


I don't need to feel love, I just wanna feel something…

by BrooklynBugleBoy



Series: His Big Disgrace [1]
Category: Bohemian Rhapsody (Movie 2018), Queen (Band)
Genre: AIDS, Blood, Cocaine, Depression, Drug Abuse, Dysfunctional Relationships, Eating Disorders, F/M, Father-Son Relationship, Fighting, Food Issues, Freddie Mercury Lives, Genetic Disorders & Abnormalities, Heroin, Improper binding techniques, Life is hard, Love, Love is hard, M/M, Original Character(s), Paleontology, Panic Attacks, Parenthood, References to Bulimia, Sad, Science, Sons, Splenectomy, Swearing, Trans Character, Unrequited Crush, Unrequited Love, Vague Sex, Weight Issues, Weight Shaming, breakdown - Freeform, troubled relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2019-11-21 15:41:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 38,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18144146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrooklynBugleBoy/pseuds/BrooklynBugleBoy
Summary: What Freddie said: “It’s a bloody disgrace!”What he always heard: “You’re a bloody disgrace!”What he said: “Well, perhaps I am. But at least this way I won’t have to be compared to the great Freddie Mercury anymore: a champion onstage and a bloody disappointment as a father.”What Freddie heard: “Thank God, no more being compared to you. I want nothing to do with you. I hate you.”Yes, they were far too alike, a stubborn father and son, and with each argument they only hurt each other more and more.(Being a father and a rockstar isn't easy. Being the son and only child of The Great Freddie Mercury is even harder.)Freddie's lament was for "Somebody to Love".His son's was to "Feel Something".





	1. You’ve always looked so much like him

**Author's Note:**

> You may ask, Cherry why did you write this teeny tiny thing during a fifteen minute bus ride?
> 
> The answer is, this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_tALF6-YNA and that I have about 0% self-control and editing prowess. (Also Daddy Issues out the wazoo, but that should be obvious). ;)
> 
> Quotes are from Feel Something by Adam Lambert! (And who I imagine he sings like).

He slowly tugged out the seat of his sitting room piano with one bare foot, a brassy golden Alma-Tadema Steinway replica with an elaborate finish  _(at least, he sincerely hoped it was a replica)._

It had been a gift from his father for his nineteenth birthday.

With both of them knowing full well that he couldn’t play worth a shit.

Well, he couldn’t play _then._

A good nine years later and he was _passable._  

He’d practiced for several years out of sheer spite alone.

He set aside his cup of coffee, yawning with a cherry bomb mouth that curled up at the sides, and using one of the hair-bands around his wrist to tug up his merlot-dyed hair into something resembling a messy bun. The youth had only dyed it the night before, so he half-expected to see his hands stained purple-red when he pulled them away. 

They weren't, so he rested his fingers on the keys.

His rings glittered in the first light of the morning and his chipped yellow nail-varnish did little to make him look worthy enough to grace the instrument that lay beneath him.

But he played anyway. Plunking out the opening lines to _Somebody to Love_ before letting the notes fade away into nothingness. That song always left a bad taste in his mouth. His brain was instantly assaulted by images of his much-revered father playing that bloody song in front of a stadium of adoring fans and had half a mind to slam the piano closed and walk away. But he didn’t. He froze, lid in his hands and slowly set it down again.

Playing a song of his own instead.

 _“I've been leaving my heart in all the wrong places…”_ He closed his eyes as he started to sing to the ghosts, to the still morning air, the words coming as an answering cry to his father’s desperate lament first sung many years ago, for someone to love. _“Took it back way too soon when I should've been patient.”_

Maybe it sounded vain, _(oh, he knew it sounded vain... he just didn't give a shit)_ , but he had always rather liked the sound of his own voice.

It was good in his opinion. Maybe not Freddie-level good, but he liked it. 

_(Roo often waxed poetic about his voice in between the desperate pleas of "Please form a band with me!" and "Quit singing in the shower, the neighbors keep complaining!")_

In another life, maybe he could have been a singer.

 _Ha!_ Maybe, in another life, he could have had a residual shred of self-worth.

Maybe he'd have something in this life that he could actually do right. More than being a whiny little bitch about everything. _(Oh poor little rockstar's son, you'll never be as successful as your Daddy)._

He pushed the sad and brittle laugh _down down down_ into his chest, where he wouldn’t have to think about it again.

Instead, the harder he tried, the more he heard his mother's voice in his head.

 

_“You’ve always looked so much like him.”_

 

It was true.

He had.

Even when he was a little boy, he got it all the time.

  
At first, they were _compliments._

_He'd liked them._

_“He looks just like his father, doesn’t he?”_

_“He’s got that lovely **exotic** look about him and those exquisite dark eyes.”_

_“He has those **teeth** , that’s for sure.”_

  
_“I built all these walls so no one could break in…”_ He bit his bottom lip, crying like the pathetic little shit he was, perhaps it added to the allure everyone said he had. An allure he had never felt. The tears fell like Swarovski crystals onto the ivory keys, fully formed and glittering in the dawn’s early light. _“Truth is I miss those nights when my heart could be naked.”_

He and Freddie _(as his father hadn’t been Baba or any other such endearment since he was old enough for primary school)_ , were so alike, that it was frightening sometimes to all who knew them both. Sometimes it was enough to scare even _him._

It was probably also why they couldn’t stand each other.

_“You self-centered pig!”_

_“You self-righteous little shit!”_

Nearly all of their conversations dissolved into shouting matches and clenched fists, veiny red cheeks, with the shards of broken hearts scattered across the floor, akin to the debris from the expensive shit being hurled across the room as an accompaniment to their screams.

Things were always going to be tense between them. They always _had been_.

Even back when he was still small enough to believe that his father was beyond human fallibility and flaws.

Even before he realized that he would _never_ be good enough. That he would never be more than a _disappointment_ to the people that he loved.

_“I don't need to feel love, I just wanna feel something…”_

What Freddie said: _“It’s a bloody disgrace!”_

What he always heard: _“You’re a bloody disgrace!”_

What he said: _“Well, perhaps I am. But at least this way I won’t have to be compared to the great Freddie Mercury anymore: a champion onstage and a bloody disappointment as a father.”_

What Freddie heard: “ _Thank God, no more being compared to you. I want nothing to do with you. I hate you.”_

Yes, they were far too alike, and with each argument they only hurt each other more and more.

His voice broke, but he kept on singing, sobbing his problems into the bright morning sky: _“If it's never enough, at least it's better than nothing…”_

_“After everyone I've lost and every kiss I wasted… I don't, I don't need to feel love…”_

 

The _compliments_ turned into _whispers_ behind his back and they started to tear into him, veritable verbal knives.

_“He’s the one… do you think he inherited the same persuasions?”_

_He'd kissed a boy on the swing-set once. It felt nice._

_But the principal who pulled them into the office, very loudly told the secretary that it was **“to be expected”.**_

_“...Of course the boy was going to be a **deviant** , just look at his father.”_

  
  
He hunched over and into himself, the notes hung on for too long and the words left his mouth like prayers. _“Just wanna feel something… Just wanna feel something… I just wanna feel!”_

_“He’s the one… I heard he joined the school choir, what a surprise.” He'd quit soon afterwards, it was the way they looked at him, or rather, looked through him._

He would bleach his hair to make it even blonder as he grew older, dye it wild colors, get numerous piercings in each ear and even through his bellybutton, wear his hair long and often tied up in a high ponytail, those stubborn strands falling in front of his eyes. He never wore flashy clothing, always oversized beige sweaters and drab baggy pants, or the other end of the spectrum with his punk rocker clothes _(a veritable clone of Sid Vicious)_. He gave people no reason to compare him to Freddie, but they did anyway.

 

_“You’ve always looked so much like him.”_

 

He thought wistfully of adding a drumbeat to the song, of having a pulse in the background to guide him. A security blanket to cling to despite his years.

But he wasn’t thinking of his Uncle Roger, who so often looked at the boy in front of him with his dyed hair and flippant attitude and called him an _entitled brat,_ especially once he hit his teenage years, an obvious bad influence on his precious kids. 

He was actually thinking of his best-friend, his soulmate. He was thinking of _Roo_.

Rufus Tiger Taylor, who was just a handful of months his senior and born premature, so they grew up attached at the hip, developing together, imprinting on each other like a pair of eager ducklings at first opportunity. And much like their fathers, they were platonic soulmates from day one.

In fact, they were so closely linked during their childhoods that most of the family even referred to the boys as _The Twins_ at one point,the inseparable pair. Despite them looking as similar as snow in July.

Yet it was rare during their shared boyhood to find him without his hand in Rufus’.

Jim Hutton, his beloved Da, would often liken them both to _The Oak King and The Holly King_ from the old parable.

Twins brothers who ruled the seasons of The Emerald Isle, so different in constitution and temperament, but who ruled together all the same. 

Although it wasn't always so peaceful. The people of Ireland used to favor the Oak King, who brought warmth and the birth of new green life wherever he went. Whereas the Holly King was hated and feared, because he brought the cold and the changing of the seasons when he won the annual battle for the climate. The people's love made the Oak King stronger and more able to overpower his brother when it came to the natural fight for dominance. So the lands grew warmer and warmer, the crops shriveled and died, and the people grew hungry. The whole world was out of balance. 

It became clear that not only was the Holly King losing, but that he was dying. 

The Oak King was distraught, he may have certainly fought with his brother over the years, but there was no one else he loved more. Life without the Holly King was not a life worth living. 

So when the time came for them to fight once more, the Oak King cast aside his sword and rushed forwards to cradle his brother, who could barely stand. 

He laid his own great oak crown on his brother's dark curls and took the holly wreath upon his towhead.

Then the proud Oak King carried his ill brother off into the great wide world, to set it back into balance once more. _Together._

Jim would only wonder for a mere instant— observing the younger versions of Roger and Freddie interacting in the garden like the tiny rapscallions that their fathers still were, playing with that train-set that he’d spent hours putting together for the children — about which would grow up to be the Holly King and which the Oak. 

...He already knew.

 _“I waited so long to feel like I'm worthy…”_  Mimì brushed some purple hair out of his eyes so that he could blink away a few more tears. He still wasn’t, you know, _not really._

Nothing he ever did was good enough, nothing he ever did was right.

All he did was disappoint.

He wasn’t talented enough to be his father’s son. And if he _was_ talented in something, _(God forbid)?_ Then he didn’t use those talents correctly.

_“Find someone who could rewrite the pages I'm turning…”_

He was too flippant and rude.

He was too defensive.

He wasn’t dedicated enough.

He was entitled.

He was careless.

He was uncaring.

He was disrespectful.

He was a disappointment in every sense of the word.

 _“I've grown with the pain and bathed in the lonely…”_ So much of his childhood had been spent backstage at concerts or alone in his room, a heavy book balanced on his knees and eager fingers tracing the words to teach himself how to pronounce them. The other kids could go off with their Mums, but his Mum had always been far more interested in her real kids, his half-brothers, the children with her husband. He was just the pity baby she grew for Freddie and dumped on the frontman to raise. Was it any wonder that Mimì ended up raising himself? _“All I want in this moment is someone to hold me.”_

Maybe it was sad, but he couldn’t remember the last time his father had held him.

His Uni graduation? No. His father had been on tour. He had gotten numerous degrees, a Dr. in front of his name and still, he was alone and congratulating himself at the ceremony.

 _No, that was wrong._ Rufus had come. Rufus came to everything. _(He still remembered being at some of his secondary school gymnastics meets, waving embarrassedly to Roo in the audience. Rufus came to everything)._

The young drummer had pressed his towhead against the dyed hair of his brother and soulmate, and had held him tight in those surprisingly muscled arms. “You did it, _Blankie.” Blanket_. Rufus’ dumb little childhood nickname for him.

“Thanks for coming, Roo.”

“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

 _“I don't need to feel love, I just wanna feel something…”_ He didn’t need somebody to love. Love was painful and cumbersome. It was like trying to carry water without a proper container. Impossible to manage, if you didn't bother to care for it or nurture it. _“If it's never enough, at least it's better than nothing…”_

Looking up at his father with painful dark eyes.

_“I hate you!”_

_“I don't, I don't wanna feel nothing! I don't, I don’t…”_ He gasped.

It was hard being the son of Freddie Mercury.

It was hard being the nephew of Roger Taylor, Brian May and John Deacon.

It was hard being an unintentional groupie of Queen from day one.

And it was really hard to repeatedly disappoint everyone he loved and everyone he didn’t.

Eventually, he just stopped _trying._

Love wasn’t worth the effort.

_“Just wanna feel something.”_

His father had named him Mimì after the character from the opera " _La Bohème"._ The most tragic character in the whole bloody thing. A poor seamstress dying of tuberculosis who barely had enough money to live on, and when her friends tried to save her life, it was too late and she died before the medicine could save her. His Persian name was his Baa’s idea. To name him _Xerxes_ and call him the Persian: _Khashayar_. After the old King of Persia, who also became an important character in the opera “ _The Persians_ ”. His best-friend Roo called him _Blanket,_ because he’d been _so_ attached to this ugly faded pink thing when he was a baby.

His father called him _a bloody disgrace._ His Uncle Bri called him _wasted potential._ His Uncle Rog called him _a bad influence._ His Uncle Deaky called him _a brave fool._  His students called him _Dr. Hutton_. The tabloids called him _The Mercury Paradox. The Prodigal Son. The Black Sheep Mercury._

 

_“You’ve always looked so much like him.”_

 

_“A pity he didn’t get any of his fathers’ talents.”_

_“He’s ashamed of his father!”_

_“He’s ashamed of his name!”_

_“Mimí, what do you have to say about the rumors that you share your father’s persuasions!?”_

_“Mimí, are you planning an album?”_

_“Mimí, is your father disappointed that you haven’t followed in his footsteps?”_

_“Have you been disowned by your father?”_

_“Do you have a statement to make about the question of your paternity?”_

 

He closed the piano and dropped his head into his hands.

_“I don’t need to feel love, I just need to feel something.”_

 

_I need to be something._

_Not an echo. Not a ghost. Not a disappointment._

_Something real._

God, can’t you find me something to _be?_

 

Something more than this.

 


	2. Well, I've heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord....

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Next tiny installment! Honestly I write most of these on bus rides. It has become the bus fic. :D 
> 
> (Sorry guys, this one is short and absolute trash. Read at your own risk). :|
> 
> I figured I should probably explain his issues with his family before I advance a plot. :) 
> 
> Quotes about Archaeopteryx: https://www.livescience.com/24745-archaeopteryx.html
> 
> The song quotes are Hallelujah by Jeff Buckley. :D

_“Well I've heard there was a secret chord_  
_That David played and it pleased the Lord_  
_But you don't really care for music, do you?”_

 

  
He smiled as he raised his dark green dry-erase marker to the whiteboard and scrawled out a few notes with tiny smiling T-Rex doodles in the margins.

“Okay you _Cretaceous Cretins_ , today we’ll be talking about that wonderful myth fostered by my favorite movie _Jurassic Park_ , about DNA material having been found encased in amber, enough to grow a whole new set of dinosaurs… Unfortunately, that’s more science fiction than fact, _but_ we have found some interesting things in those pretty rocks, one being a set of 99 million-year-old _flight feathers_. Oh, you might be thinking, _'But Dr. Hutton, feathers are no big deal. We all know about dinosaurs' modern day descendants'._ And yes, you should if you're in a high-level course like mine. But we didn't know _back then_ and these are  _imprints_ of  _fully-formed un-degraded intact feathers!_ The proof of our modern day dinosaurs! _Birds!"_

His hand faltered.

He still remembered the first time he saw a dinosaur with _feathers._

Eight years old, missing one of his front teeth, with his tiny hand cradled in his Uncle Bri’s.

Before that head of curls had turned snowy white, and Mimì had still had a heart buoyed with something akin to the hope… the vain _hope_ that maybe he could be someone’s pride and joy one day.

They'd explored the museum’s dinosaur exhibit on the way to the planetarium. And he'd spotted the life-size _Archaeopteryx_ model for the first time.

He was in love at first sight.

It was the size of a chubby raven and had a primitive shoulder girdle that allowed it to have limited flapping abilities, but more importantly… it’s whole body was _covered_ in the brightest and most magnificent plumage. He had seized the golden plague nailed below with both hands, dark eyes glittering with wonder as he traced every word etched upon it.

“Look Uncle Brimi, _look!”_

He read it aloud, in an unwavering awe-filled voice, so eager to share something that had sparked a new feeling inside of his chest. Perhaps he'd seen into the future in that instant, seen what he would become. “ _Paleontologists view Archaeopteryx as a transitional fossil between dinosaurs and modern birds. With its blend of avian and reptilian features, it was long viewed as the earliest known bird. Discovered in 1860 in Germany, it's sometimes referred to as Urvogel, the German word for "original bird" or "first bird.”’_

Brian had smiled and laughed at the joy on his child-chubby face, bending down to scoop him up and place him on his shoulders _(so high up)_ , and promised to bring him back to look at the dino bird again, _after_ they had visited the planetarium.

Mimì had agreed, knowing full well that none of his cousins had ever been interested in his Uncle’s passion for space or science in general. And that Uncle Bri had looked so bloody _happy_ when he had suggested going that morning.

The little boy had smiled as well, even bigger than the yellow stripe grin on a _Happy Meal_ box. _You guys won’t do this for him, but I will._ He had been so proud to have something to share.

_I'm going to be his favorite._

He had sat in the reclining chair, still, obedient and transfixed as the planets whizzed past on the ceiling. Whispering questions into his Uncle’s ear all the while.

_“Hey Uncle Brimi, why does Saturn have rings?”_

_“How come Jupiter weighs the least, but it’s the biggest?”_

_“How many moons does Neptune have?”_

_“How big are they?”_

Each question was answered with such tenderness and joy, warm breath and stubble tickling his cowrie shell ear and the gentle weight of Uncle Brimi’s big arms encircling him, hugging him close, guiding his tiny finger around like a compass to point out every single constellation up in the sky. He couldn’t think of a time when he had felt more loved. And it was obvious that the whole experience of getting to share his knowledge and his passion with his nephew, had brought the aging guitarist so much happiness.

“I’m going to be a scientist, Uncle Bri.” He had announced when they left the show, grinning ear to ear. “I’m going to study the stars, just like you.”

Even though, all he really wanted was to pick out a pop-up dinosaur book out from the museum shop, _(he could even see one about chickens being modern dinosaurs)_ , he chose a heavy tome on comets that he could barely carry on his own.

The smile on Uncle Bri’s face was well-worth it.

"Are you sure that you want this one?"

"Uh huh, I'm sure!" 

A big hand tousled his towhead.

He learned then, that you make _sacrifices_ for the ones you love.

He left the dinosaur books behind, choosing his Uncle Brimi and the stars instead.

Choosing a future _heartbreak_ for the young man he would become… having wasted three and a half years of his life on an Astrophysics degree at University that he didn’t _want_. That he had only done out of duty. He wanted to be a Paleontologist, had ever since he was a child, and had found a Hail Mary program that would accept the majority of his credits. Telling Brian though… that bit _hurt._

_“You’re wasting all of this? You’re throwing it all away? …And for what?”_

Brian's trembling arms swept around the room that they had decorated together over the years, with star charts and various astronomy paraphernalia, posters, stereo-pictures, and stickers.

Everything in the room was _theirs._

How many nights had his doting uncle tutored him on that scratched-up desk in the corner? How many times had they watched cosmos documentaries together on that lumpy couch, laughing at the holier-than-thou narrators?

Space was what connected them. Space was the reason they still spent time together. _Space_ was the reason Brian loved him...

That room was his safe haven.

Space was his safe haven. 

Brian was his safe haven. 

When shit got bad between him and Freddie, when Da chose to favor Freddie in every single one of their bloody arguments. He could run to Brimi. He could always run to…

There were _tears_ in his Uncle Brian’s eyes.

That was when everything became crystal clear. 

 

_All he knew how to do was destroy._

_Why was he so surprised?_

 

Then he saw _the book_ on a nearby shelf, that impossibly heavy book on comets that he had never wanted. 

The book that Brian had spent years reading aloud to him like bedtime story. 

The book that had been dog-eared and tossed about, it's spine cracked, it's pages torn and taped.

It had found a second home in backpacks, duffel bags, country after country, tour after tour. It meant so much now, good and bad.

The book he then picked up, in shaking hands, his lavender-painted fingernails digging into the cover, and used it to smash the gold-plated telescope Brian bought him for his thirteenth birthday, still pointed gently out the window. They had put it together from funny instructions that didn’t make sense and were half in Swedish. He could still remember how they had laughed, how the eyepiece still had his initials etched on the underside. 

The sound of it shattering reminded him of home.

He felt sick. 

“Are you _crazy?!”_ The old man in front of him screamed, voice thick with grief. The floor was covered in debris.

He worried about Brian’s bare feet, not sparing a single thought to his own. Eyes wide, he had tried to step forwards, arms outstretched for... _what?_ A _hug?_

_Absolution?_

“Get out of my house!” 

Brian was crying.

They both were. 

 _“No! I’ll do it! I’ll get a million degrees in Astrophysics! I’ll join NASA! I’ll go to Tenerife! I’ll buy us a new telescope! I’ll glue every single ruddy piece back together! I will!”_ He wanted to sob, falling to his knees. “ _Please, Uncle Bri! Please I can’t lose you too! All Freddie and I do is fight! Da will never choose me over him, you know that! Uncle Roger only sees me as another problem to be fixed... My Mum isn’t my Mum! She’s their Mum not mine! Uncle Deaky doesn’t care about me anymore… All I’ve got is Rufus, and one day he won’t want me either.”_ He’d get married, he’d have children.

Because at the core of his empty cavernous chest, Mimì knew that Rufus would never love him the way he loved Rufus.

He wanted to lay it all bare. To fall to his knees and spread his arms wide open, he had nothing left to give, nothing left to hide, nothing left...

Just the sorry, pathetic truth, that he’d do _anything_ for someone to love him.

Yet he said none of it.

He just _ran._

 _Wasted Potential_ was right.

 _“Well it goes like this:_  
_The fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift_  
_The baffled king composing Hallelujah…”_

_I’m sorry, Uncle Brimi._

_I’m so sorry._

 

The marker squealed from all the pressure he was putting on the whiteboard and he was shocked back into the present, one of his students was talking to him.

  
“Dr. Hutton? Are you alright?” She had soulful green eyes that matched her jumper and was chewing on the tip of her purple pen only a moment before.

“Oh yes, I’m fine.” He waved a hand. “Anyway, what I was saying was…”

_“Hallelujah…”_

He wasn’t fine that night, he drank until he threw up on his shoes and then drank some more. Desperate to make his head hurt as much as his heart, or maybe drown himself in cheap liquor until he couldn’t feel anything anymore. Feeling was so overrated anyway.

 _“Hallelujah…_ ”

Somehow he had ended up in the front passenger seat of his Uncle Deaky’s car in the wee hours of the morning. His head buried in the quivering damp knees that he had crunched up tightly into his chest, his thin arms locked around them and trying to shove down his urge to vomit. The seasoned father beside him looked both exhausted and concerned as he reached out and attempted to rest a hand on the boy’s shoulder. A hand that was quickly shrugged off.

 _“Rog…_ ” Deaky stopped shortly, shaking off his sleepy stupor. “I mean _Fred… Shit.”_

He looked so broken up about it, but all Mimì did was hunker down deeper into himself. It didn’t matter. _Nothing mattered_ when you really thought about it.

“Jus’ lee me ‘lone.” He hiccuped into his bony knees, being the drunk asshole kid that he was at heart. “I don’ need you! I don’ nee anybody.”

His head really hurt.

He shouldn't have taken those pills at the club, they probably didn't mix well with his own.

_You weren't supposed to drink on antibiotics._

_Oops._

Before Deaky could start in on _the talk,_ the one he really didn’t mean and that he was only having with the youth out of guilt and pity, the boy staggered out of the car and over to the front stoop of Garden Lodge on his weak lamby knees. Nearly braining himself on the concrete before he could find his balance again. Digging around in his pockets, looking for the keys that he knew he didn’t bring.

His doe-eyed Uncle drove away, not knowing any better, nearly turning around more than once.

The drunk boy simply sunk to his knees and shivered into his black leather jacket, purposely poked through with what felt like a dozen safety pins. He curled into himself on the stoop, and fell asleep to the sound of his own voice. _“Happy Birthday to me… H-Happy Birthday to me… Happy Birthday, Mr. Mercury… Happy Birthday to me.”_

He thought he was going to die that night, that he was going to freeze to death on the doormat and nobody would give a single shit otherwise.

He didn't. 

He woke up on the couch in the living room of the Lodge with a red dressing gown draped over him like a blanket and a plate of slightly burnt oatmeal cookies on the coffee table next to him. His favorite. 

It made him cry. 

 

“Dr. Hutton?”

His hands were shaking.

He clapped them together.

“Ooo! I have an even better idea!” Forcing a smile. “How about we put on _Jurassic Park_ and point out all the paleontological inaccuracies!” He pulled the movie up on Netflix through a few quivering taps on his computer and flipped the lights. Not allowing himself to break down in front of his students.

"One point on next test for each inaccuracy you write down and explain!"

He saved that for a few hours later when he was alone in his office once more.

A single candle stuck in the red velvet cupcake on his desk.

_“Happy Birthday to me… Happy Birthday to me… Happy Birthday, Mr. Mercury… Happy Birthday to me.”_

He blew out the candle.

  
_“Well your faith was strong but you needed proof_  
_You saw her bathing on the roof_  
_Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya.”_

  
Rufus pressed a featherlight kiss to Blanket’s crinkled forehead, easing the tension slightly. 

They were cuddling on an uncomfortable leather couch, their heads pressed together, with three little naked felines curled up in the space between their tummies, his ankles locked tightly to keep the sleepy wine-haired professor from tumbling off the damn thing, ass over elbows.

All of Blanket’s cats were practically his _own_ children by this point as well, loath as he was to admit it.

Wrinkles was looking at him bayfully, just as she had the day she’d given birth to two new hairless kittens, all tiny and shriveled alien-like creatures, small enough to fit in the palms of their hands, with little eyes and ears still sealed shut with their meager days on earth.

 _Ball-sack cats,_ as Blanket had lovingly called them, _wrinkly foreskin friends._

Ugly little fuckers.

A naked little face climbed up the veritable maze of limbs to boop against Rufus’ nose and mouth, mewing plaintively for more attention. The young drummer could taste the oily Sphynx skin in his mouth and rolled his eyes. “Oi, Blankie, your son needs a bath.” In his favorite sing-song voice of course. Nudging the boy in question with his denim-clothed knee. 

The cuddly younger man hummed without looking, “Which one?” Then answered his own question. 

He blinked open his corpulent butterfly lashes to expose those pretty incongruent dark eyes, and peered closely at the tiny gray face, “Oh, it’s Prunella.” Another yawn.

“Is it bath-time? Should I grab the swim suits and fill the tub?” Already wiggling around to do so.

Rufus pressed a kiss to his best-friend’s temple once he saw his chance, prompting a raspberry from the younger man. “You read my mind. I’ll herd the kids.”

Sometimes he really wished he wasn’t straight, or that Blanket could at least _see_ what an amazing person he was.

Freddie or no Freddie. Queen or no Queen.

Of course _he_ could see it, underneath all the colors streaked in his best-friend's hair and the baby roundness of his cheeks, Blanket still carried his father with him wherever he went.

But that wasn’t a _bad thing_ , it was just who Blanket _was._

 

_“She tied you to her kitchen chair.._

_And she broke your throne and she cut your hair_  
_And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah…”_

 

A delighted Blanket splashed him with a cup full of oily bathwater and oodles of Johnson’s baby shampoo, a terrible combination, as they tried to keep their wet and slimy kids inside the tub.

“Quick! Get Raisin!” The squirmy baby cat in question was soon recaptured from the lip of the tub and nestled against Blankie’s fuzzy tan chest. They were both laughing at the messy situation and choking with the humor of it all.

Even as little Raisin mewed in outrage and nipped at one of Blanket’s exposed nipples. A DIY nipple piercing. 

The young man squealed at a pitch that could have rivaled his father's and Rufus snorted, with a wriggly ball-sack cat of his own tucked under each arm.

 

 _“But baby I've been here before_  
_I've seen this room and I've walked this floor_  
_You know, I used to live alone before I knew ya..."_

 

Sometimes he wished that his best-friend understood just how _beautiful_ he was.

How _breathtaking._

How Rufus loved him in every way except the one.

How all those things that Freddie and Blanket despised the most about each other were actually the things they shared.

They could both command a crowd, an audience, like breathing, holding millions or tens in the palms of their hands and tricking them into thinking the captivity was a privilege, those two could convince the world to rotate the wrong direction or a clutch of top-tier scientists to declare that the world was flat. They both had an unbelievable power in their voices, an amazingly powerful gift.

_Natural leaders, natural performers._

 

 _“But remember when I moved in you_  
_And the holy dove was moving too_  
_And every breath we drew was Hallelujah…_ ”

 

Although Freddie had always been able to easily move from one plane of existence to another.

He could just as easily be an audience’s _Freddie Mercury_ , the legendary frontman of Queen, a world-renowned rockstar, for one minute. Then switch gears completely and be _their Freddie,_ the beloved friend, uncle, father and husband in old trackie bottoms complete with campy gestures that came so naturally to him, in the next. It was a disarming switch, but one that was common enough to them, because of how long they had known Freddie.

His son either did not have that skill or did not see the point in exercising it, because that same level of intensity that he had when he captivated a crowd, was present in the boy at every hour and in every waking moment of every day.

It was a bewitching thing and it seemed as though, most of the time, Blanket didn’t even know he had that natural magnetism at all.

He would even laugh when Rufus tried to point it out.

"You're mistaking me for Freddie again, Roo."

 _"No, I'm not!"_ He wanted to scream. _"You can't get mad when people call you a **second-rate Freddie** , if that's how you see **yourself!"**_

It was no wonder they didn't get along.

Just the vague concept of trying to force two amazingly creative people, endowed with the same gift yet who had used it in such different ways, into a life together in close proximity, was always going to end badly. It was just a question of how much bloodshed would be involved in the end.

 

“ _Maybe there's a God above_  
_But all I've ever learned from love_  
_Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya.”_

 

Watching and listening to Blanket sing and write his music was something else.

And not for the first time, Rufus' hatred for their lot in life burned low in his belly.

He knew full well that _he_ had to fight just to be taken seriously as a drummer. And that half of his fan-base was because he was the son of _The Great Roger Taylor_ and looked just like him when he was young, not through his own merit. But he knew it was so much worse for Mimì who wasn’t pursing what he loved because of who his father was.

They both had amazing voices, but their voices were amazing in different ways.

Freddie was Freddie. There was no question about that. 

But Mimì could belt out the most crazy range on demand and had the most insane vocal and tongue control. He could be soft and compressed one minute, and then belting out and holding a crazy high note in the next.

All while turning to Rufus with a smile on his face and a nervous look in his eyes.

“Was that okay?”

Like he hadn’t just blown everyone else out of the water.

“You’re _crazy_ , you know that?”

A little laugh and blush. “I try, Roo. I try.”

 

“ _And it's not a cry that you hear at night_  
_It's not somebody who's seen the light_  
_It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah…”_

 

Mimì ran his thumb over the words he’d scrawled into his song notebook.

He ripped out the pages and tossed them into the crackling fireplace. 

 

“ _Hallelujah…”_


	3. Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A tiny bit more trashy bus fic! Enjoy! :) 
> 
> Features Beautiful Boy by John Lennon

Never let it be said that Freddie Mercury didn’t love his only son.

His only _child._

Roger could still see the horror painted up like a bloody _Rembrandt_ on his best-friend’s face _that day_. The day Mimì had flipped over the handlebars of his bicycle while out playing with the other children, sending their world into a nauseating tailspin as a result.

The tiny hellion had managed to slam into the handlebars of his bike at just the perfect angle and force required to cleave his bloody spleen _in two._

_His spleen._

Roger thought back to all those bloody pointless biology classes. The spleen was a bit like an enormous lymph node, a pivotal part of the immune system, the body's defense system against illness. As well as a blood filter with an incredibly large constant supply. More than just the hit his immune system would take, a splenic injury that bad was enough to cause the little boy to bleed out in a very short amount of time. 

The drummer would think back in later years, smile and shake his head ruefully, remarking that only _Freddie’s_ child could find a way to turn an ordinary childhood accident usually requiring little more than a plaster and a kiss, into a life-threatening emergency that required invasive surgery, five hours in theatre and life-long prophylactic antibiotics.

 _Dramatic little shit_ , he would sigh, reaching over to prod the young college professor in his soft side. 

It _was_ funny with a healthy Baby Mercury right there beside him, full of spit and fire and a laconic wit that could have easily rivaled John Lennon’s.

But it had been _the furthest thing_ from funny back then, in the moment his frantic younger son had burst into the backyard at Garden Lodge in a complete state.

Rufus had sprinted in, talking a mile a minute and trying to explain what had happened, while he was still trembling from the shock himself and crying silently, the little boy had been a wreck. It was no wonder, he'd just seen his best-friend, his _brother_ , have the worst bike injury that he’d ever seen in front of his very eyes.

Phoebe had followed in soon after, gingerly carrying a sobbing Baby Mercury in his broad arms.

The ten-year-old had looked so tiny and fragile in his hold, feet dangling limp like a doll's over the crest of his bicep, nothing like the brat who’d been arguing with Freddie that morning _(if Roger had thought he and Freddie’s arguments had been legendary, well they had nothing on Mercury v.s. Mercury)_ , the child’s swelling stomach was already blooming in an impressive motley of colors on one side and it looked rigid to the touch _(blood collecting free-flow in his belly, an irritant to the other organs)_. When Roger’s hand tentatively brushed the boy’s icy pale skin, it was practically on fire.

He had taken the sobbing little boy into his arms next, forcing himself to remain calm.

As the only one with the slightest inclination of first-aid practices or medicine, he tended to be the one who took over anytime one of their babies was sick or hurt.

Just as he had steeled himself, ready to plan and confront what he had to do next, waiting for the angry shouts from the child in his hold, the indignant cries and bad attitude, _(the vicious **fight** , knowing Mimì)_. Instead all he got was a tear-stained, sweaty face pressed into his sternum and his heart breaking into jagged pieces, when those tiny shivering fingers curled into the hair at the nape of his neck.

“My tummy hurts really bad, Uncle Roggie. I think it’s _broke_.”

The tiny thing had whispered softly, as if speaking too loudly was growing painful, blinking up at Roger with a round face that so resembled Freddie’s, one so full of trust and love. _(It struck him dumb sometimes, that of all their band's children, Freddie would be the one to grow a mini-me)._

_Where was the bite?_

_Where was the fight?_

Roger had felt ill at the thought, but it was true.

Sometimes the boy in his arms was just so _difficult_ , so wild and bright and _other_ , that it was easy to forget how he was just that… a _child, Freddie’s child._

Freddie’s son.

Freddie who leaned over into their space, tenderly kissing at his son’s fuzzy temple, hushing his cries, soothing him. Two different creatures born of light, flame and something unique that no one else had, yet so identical to each other that it was scary.

Different apples, same tree. 

Their fires seemed to dull to little more than embers however, as Freddie tried desperately to soothe his child. The tiny boy looked so still and motionless in Roger’s lap as they raced to A&E. Sure, that could easily be explained away by shock, but it was _so wrong._

The little demon in his lap was meant to be a tempest, a force to be reckoned with, he was scalding, flamboyant, funny and impossibly loud and demanding. But now the broken doll in his lap was silent, aside from his choked off little sobs, the way he hung off Roger's front like a limpet.

Freddie had never wanted to be a parent.

Roger _knew that_.

He remembered being young, drunk on life and cheap booze, when Freddie had unequivocally told him so.

“I don’t want to feel responsible, dear. Not if my child ends up fucked.”

_I grew up in a tiny boarding school in India, where the only person who raised me was me._

_I don’t know how to be a good father to my son._

_I’m so scared, Roggie_.

He knew what his best-friend would never say.

He saw the writing between the lines of smudged ink that made up Freddie.

The surgeon who came to introduce himself was starstruck by them, but he clearly knew well enough to hide it.

Their Freddie must have looked so callous to him. Almost _flippant._ As the famous frontman was nearly as still and as silent as his baby boy had been, only moments before when they wheeled him away. Fred only spoke up to complain about the shitty washrooms or the shoddy colors of the nurses’ mandatory scrubs.

Roger even heard him bitch about clashing paint shades for a good hour and a half to some poor unsuspecting orderly.

Because he knew the truth.

He saw the way that Freddie had to keep brushing his eyes with his silk scarf, smothering his sobs with ill-timed coughs and pretending to be a bitch to hide the way that he was breaking to pieces inside.

“This place smells disgustingly of bleach.” Nose wrinkled and a sour grimace on his face.

“I know, Fred.”

“And those flowers are dead.” They both watched as a single shriveled brown petal made the short descent to earth.

“They are.”

Freddie bristled. “I sincerely hope they keep their patients alive better than they do the bloody plants!”

Then, as if realizing what he’d just said, Roger held his best-friend as he dissolved into tears, nearly bending in two with the weight of the world, his shoulders shaking like boughs in the breeze.

Never let it be said that Freddie Mercury didn’t love his only son.

Roger was there when his best-friend rushed into the wide-open recovery room, done up with pleasant colors and fancy windows to make it seem homey in a way that it never would be, it was cluttered with automatic machines and empty sterile white tables, with a little Mimì asleep in the middle of all the chaos.

A clunky blue and white tube spiraled out of his pink mouth and his eyes were still taped shut against the world. Freddie had been so afraid to touch the sleeping child, just like he'd been when Mimì was only a newborn, lying still and asleep in his crib with his flyaway blonde hair and gossamer-lashed eyes.

But concern won the mental battle and he reached out a few trembling fingers to brush back the few remaining strands of hair that rested on his boy's forehead, sitting just outside the surgical cap. Then, more confident, he slowly tugged the crinkly white sheets away.

Roger watched as Freddie's eyes widened. His skin turned the color of clear nail varnish as he made a sound akin to that of a dying humpback whale, or just about any animal in its death throes, his knees nearly giving out beneath him. The drummer had to lunge to catch him.

“They’ve fucking cut him in half!”

It was a guttural moan into his neck more than it was a statement, and the blonde had stiffened, taken aback.

Later he would understand the sentiment, when he saw the child’s belly and more pointedly _the incision._

It was an enormous diagonal swipe across his abdomen, almost comically large on Mimì's tiny frame and looked so unbelievably painful. Each stitch was dilated and swollen, it weeped for days. 

Deaky would have the same reaction hours later, when he arrived with Brian and Jim, all the kids in tow. Jim had been horrified and froze in the doorway, practically going catatonic. The bassist dragged him off to speak with the doctor, while Brian took the kids to the cafeteria, disguising his own panic well enough.

Roger just sat and watched.

Watched the way that Freddie sat vigil at his son’s bedside.

Kissing his tiny hands.

“ _Close your eyes, have no fear. The monster's gone, he’s on the run and your daddy's here…”_ Freddie was crooning softly, swaying side to side like he wanted to rock his son. _“Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful… Beautiful boy…”_

  
Never let it be said that Freddie Mercury didn’t love his only son.

_Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful…_

_Beautiful boy…_

  
Never let it be said that Mimì Hutton didn’t love Freddie Mercury.

A blanket and a kiss was all it took.

Roger still remembered Mimì at two years old, having fallen asleep in the studio whilst Freddie _(the tiny boy's beloved Baba)_ was still mid-recording with the band.

It wasn’t out of place, far from it. In fact, most of their children had been left snoozing on the studio couch at one time or another.

The toddler had stumbled over, spit and snot drying on his cheeks and sleepy eyes heavy, as he’d clambered into his father’s lap. Freddie had been talking to Brian about God only knows what, Freddie had a thing about describing musical sounds with his mouth instead of in musical terms his bandmates understood, but he’d stopped as soon as his legs had become suddenly occupied by the tiny human he’d created.

“ _Baba tired.”_

Freddie had originally thought it was a statement about his son's well-being. ( _What parent could fluently speak toddler?)_

They all had as well.

“I know you’re tired, lovie. We’ll go home soon.” Pressing absentminded kisses to those searching little hands. But the boy had been incurably stubborn, even then. He’d taken up a clump of his faded pink blankie that had earned him his nickname and made a big show of tucking his father up into his chair with every care in the world. Then laying himself on top, folding himself into the crook of Freddie’s arm, happy as a bird.

The drummer noticed the way that the little boy’s hands sported near-perfect yellow varnish on the tiny nails.

The same hand he used to pat his father’s chin and press a kiss to his whiskery cheek.

“Baba sleepy. _Goodnight_ , Baba.”

Freddie's nails were a messy black that was half-spilled onto the cuticles and pads of his fingers.

The drummer was suddenly struck by how tired Freddie looked, with the dark circles beneath his eyes and tense set to his mouth and then, how all of that melted away with his child in his arms.

No one was surprised when all of a minute later, their Mercury was asleep in the chair, his little son keeping watch, nuzzling into his side and blinking up at him sluggishly every few minutes, with all the adoration in the world.

  
Never let it be said that Mimì Hutton didn’t love Freddie Mercury.

  
_“Cocaine?_ Of all the shit you could choose to start with and it’s _fucking cocaine!?”_

Freddie shoved his wayward teenage son into the foyer of Garden Lodge, his eyes livid and his fists shaking with white-knuckled rage.

"You could have _died!_ Do you understand that?!"

The boy was just as angry as Fred but didn’t scream, instead he _smiled_ with far too many teeth, apathetic to the world around him. Roger was frozen in the kitchen, staring with horror at the scene before him, clearly Freddie had forgotten he had company. The boy was dressed up like they used to, too tight leather trousers, suspenders, glitter and ground up ecstasy in his hair. Eyes crazy dilated like he was on the longest trip of his life, peachy vomit drying on his shirt.

The blonde wondered just how much the kid had taken to make him puke like that.

Of course it was _Freddie’s boy_ who’d be targeted at a party, Baby Mercury with the pretty voice that could rival his father’s at its most imposing.

Baby Mercury who didn’t have Freddie’s experience, Freddie’s restraint.

Baby Mercury who was _laughing_ at his father’s rage.

Laughing without the humor and in a way that shook him from head-to-toe, almost like wracking sobs. The sight only incensed Freddie further and for a moment, Roger was terrified that his best-friend would snap and raise a hand against his troubled teenager. _(He pointedly ignored the flashes of himself and his father that played on the backs of his eyelids. That boy was really too much like them)._

But he didn’t, instead he just asked, in a voice as cold as ice.

“You think this is _funny?”_

Mimì had looked him dead-on and smiled.

“It’s funny that you think I _started_ on cocaine tonight.”

Freddie looked so fucking broken for an instant, then his features turned steely.

“Get away from me… I don’t want to see your fucking _face_ anymore.”

The boy didn't need to be told twice, he bounded up the stairs and the sound his footfalls made on the wooden steps were like gunshots, echoing through the house that wasn't quite big enough anymore.

Roger had turned to Jim, the poor man who was watching the whole thing beside him with a sort of detached icy shame. He held a teacup and saucer in his hands, both were shaking.

“ _Jim_ …” The blonde wanted to start, but he didn’t know how to end.

Not for the first time, Roger regarded the boy with a sense of sadness and shameful apprehension. _Mimì Xerxes Hutton_ was a lost cause. Far too much like himself at his most impossible and far too much like the worst side of Freddie. Nothing could stop that train from going off the tracks and frankly, _selfishly_ , he realized that it hurt too much to try.

  
None of them knew the truth, that those girls Freddie had caught his son with at the club, doing cocaine in the wrong bathroom's stalls, had actually seen the way he looked at himself in the mirror and had just handed him a toothbrush.

“If you push it all the way back the first time, it’ll get easier.” A girl had told him, one with a skeletal body and hollow eyes that seemed to consume the room around her, instead of being part of it. Yet her face was swollen and her eyes ruddy red with burst capillaries. 

It didn’t.

  
None of them saw the way that he crept down the stairs once everyone was blissfully asleep and everything had stopped being so _loud_ , with that ratty pink blanket clutched in one hand. The blanket that had always made him think of better times. 

He tucked it around the prone form of his sleeping father, Jim having been unable to coax the stewing frontman up to bed.

The teen pressed a shameful too-gentle kiss into the old man’s greying temple as he bundled him up against the chill.

  
“I’m sorry, Baba.”

_I'm so sorry._

_I've fucked everything up, yet again._

 

_...Are you even surprised anymore?_

 

He himself wasn't surprised. 

  
Never let it be said that Mimì Hutton didn’t love Freddie Mercury.

Never let it be said that Freddie Mercury didn’t love his only son.

 

 

But that didn’t mean he was good at loving himself.

  
_“Before you cross the street_  
_Take my hand_  
_Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans…_

_Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful…_

_Beautiful boy…”_

 


	4. Ain't youth meant to be beautiful?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Features Teen Idle by Marina and the Diamonds :)))
> 
> BUS FIC YAY!!!
> 
> Also DO NOT BIND WITH ACE WRAPS!!! (Just a general PSA).

_“I wanna be a bottle blonde_  
_I don't know why but I feel conned_  
_I wanna be an idle teen_  
_I wish I hadn't been so clean…”_

 

 

There had always been _something_ about Freddie’s son.

John worried about his own kids, it was just something that came naturally, and he often worried about his other nephews and nieces as well, it was simply what a _parent_ did.

But there was always something that worried him far more about Freddie’s son.

The kind of worry that made his heart beat a little off-kilter. That made him answer frantic calls in the middle of the night and drop everything to offer aid to the boy on the off-chance he needed it.

_(Part of him worried about Freddie’s son like he should have worried about Freddie back then, in those dark years when he'd needed them most)._

Mimì, who had always been a worrisome mix of Roger and Freddie in their wild and reckless youth, even when he was far too young to be so. 

Mimì, who had always been as stubborn and as impossibly bright as the sun in the sky. Who loved and hated with equal abandon and ferocity. He who would fight like a bloodthirsty lion for those he loved, and he who would tear you limb from limb like the same bloodthirsty lion… if you _dared_ to break his heart.

Mimì, who had stood in front of John at seven years old, hands on his hips and a scowl on his lips.

A collection of multicolored poster-boards resting next to him, painstakingly scribbled on with fruit-scented markers, the same ones that stained his tiny hands and that would soon adorn his white pants, his stripes of bravery.

The little boy made a big show of setting up the boards on his handmade art easel _(Jim had made it for him on his last birthday and he hadn’t stopped using it for everything since... There were stickers on the base and spots of paint on the corners, the physical anchor of a child's life)._

It was during one of their mandatory family lunches in Garden Lodge, that the primary-schooler had decided to make his important announcement and was vehement that _everyone listen_ to what he had to say.

He commanded Freddie back down into his seat, commandeered Brian’s song notebook that he was always scribbling in, practically forced Rog’s prescription sunglasses onto his face and had hidden the eagerly awaited pudding from the other kids, until they all agreed to sit down and listen to what the younger boy had to say.

Mimì had looked quite proud of himself for a moment, before he flipped the first poster.

John swallowed back a groan, and attempted to look pensive.

There on the pristine white backdrop, was written in a clumsy child’s hand:

_Why Uncle Deaky Should Stop Smoking!_

_A presentation by Mimì Xerxes Hutton._

The little boy had attempted to draw a box of Marlboros on the side, next to the words to emphasize his point, but he’d misspelled the name so it read _Marborrows_ instead.

For some reason, that tiny insignificant little thing made the bassist’s heart clench in his chest.

Probably the same effect the clever boy had been going for. _(He was almost certain that the little smart-ass could spell anything he wanted if he set his mind to it)._

For any other child, it probably would have been considered _too devious_ or _too conniving_ to think so, but not for Mimì.

He stole another glance at the frightfully tight set to the boy’s mouth, a tiny mockery of Fred’s, and the disapproving tilt of the hands on his hips.

Yes, _certainly not_ for Mimì.

It probably wasn't right to be as scared as he was of a seven-year-old.

But Mimì was no ordinary seven-year-old.

Which was only emphasized later on by his flawless pronunciation and explanation of _Verruciform xanthoma, Leukoplakia_ and _Erythroplakia._ John had raised several children and he knew child development far too well not to be perplexed by the tiny boy, who was the small human embodiment of a firecracker in some moments, but as freakishly eloquent as a college professor when it suited him most.

An ordinary child would have point-blank asked him to stop smoking.

Mimì made a detailed pie chart of pros and cons and listed at least eighteen types of mouth cancer.

John worried.

He worried about what the little boy’s future would hold.

Certain that there were only two options for the _different_ sort of boy in front of him. Either the world was going to rip that child apart or that child was going to rip apart the world.

Each idea was equally as terrifying.

“Please, Uncle Deaky,” Mimì eventually whimpered into John’s chest, when the presentation had come to an end. “I don’t want you to die, ever.”

_This boy…_

“Okay, you’ve convinced me.” If he was being honest, he probably should have quit a long time ago. Bri had never smoked, Rog and Fred had both quit in the 80’s. He was the only hold out.

Ronnie was looking at him pointedly, as were his older children, and bandmates. There was only one choice to make.

“I’m quitting.”

The little boy raised his head, eyes narrowed in suspicion through the tears that bubbled there on his waterline.

“You promise?”

John smiled, placatingly. “I promise.”

But Freddie’s son didn’t eat it up as easily as everyone else had, he was critical in a way that had always been so disarming to the people around him. His eyes narrowed even further, and he raised his hand, his pinkie in particular. “Pinkie swear?”

“I pinkie swear.”

Gently linking them together.

And he kept that promise.

_(Mimì still sent him a card on the anniversary every year)._

  
_“I wanna stay inside all day_  
_I want the world to go away_  
_I want blood, guts, and chocolate cake_  
_I wanna be a real fake.”_

  
There was a special place in his heart for that _brave little fool._

Which only intensified the worrying.

Especially when their problem child became a problem teenager and everything went predictably down the shitter.

To hell in a _Louis Vuitton_ , instead of an ordinary hand-basket _(that wasn’t Mercury enough, it would seem)._

It wasn’t perfect before, but God knows it only got worse when the uncontrollable child became the uncontrollable teen, with a stubborn streak a mile wide and a chip on his shoulder.

It became commonplace to see a young Freddie again playing peekaboo in Mimì’s round face, high on his own youth and whatever pills they were popping in those new glitzy hideaways, with the shiny blue foil of a condom held between his teeth and a leather jacket slung lazily over one shoulder.

The teenage boy so eager to be a man, who would always look over at them with such distain and annoyance now, peering though those thickly lined cat-eyes, the pretty gloss on his bruised red lips and yesterday’s love-bites hidden by his too-tight black pants and the red lacy underthings that peeked out from beneath his trousers.

“Don’t wait up.”

A blown kiss over his freckled shoulder as he sauntered out on the town, looking far too much like his father for his own good.

There was just something about Mimì that made him so hard to understand.

The other kids all had a little _something_ inside them as well, but it was a _shared little something_ that Mimì had never possessed. The other kids knew it too. That their cousin was the piece that had never quite fit.

They were never unkind to him, at least John didn't see it if they were.

But there was a clear unspoken divide between them that only Rufus could cross.

They loved him, he loved them, they were his brothers and sisters in all but name. Yet they weren’t close, never had been and never would be.

What was probably worse though, was with how perceptive Freddie’s son was, that he’d probably known about how different he was since the beginning.

He didn’t fight for his place among the other kids, not in the way he fought for everything else.

He had never even _tried_.

Perhaps because he’d always known that he would lose.

  
_“Yeah, I wish I'd been, I wish I'd been, a teen… teen idle_  
_Wish I'd been a prom queen, fighting for the title_  
_Instead of being sixteen and burning up a bible_  
_Feeling super, super, super suicidal…”_

  
They were all sitting around backstage after once of their London shows.

Mimì was newly seventeen, playing a game of absentminded Scrabble with them, one of his long freckled legs slung over the side of the couch in a pair of teeny tiny red leather shorts that left next-to-nothing to the imagination. His natural blonde hair on display for once, Jim had made him swear off dyeing it for a whole year to let the damn strands rest. One side of his eye-makeup was smudged and he’d yawned at least four times in the last minute alone.

Freddie looked like he was fighting the urge to drag his overgrown baby boy in for a cuddle and let him finally sleep, protected and safe in his father’s arms.

( _Another thing father and son shared. The push-push-push until what they were working on was perfect, health and well-being be damned, promptly shoved to the wayside)._

But the frontman didn’t dare make a move.

Too scared of the rejection that he knew would follow.

The rejection that always had.

John sighed, internally, focusing on the rest of the room instead.

Just in time.

Groupies and fans often came up to them backstage, nervous and shy. And the young man who sidled up them with an a quivering smile on his face was no different, twirling his backstage pass around his fingers, his white-painted nails flickering in the gentle light of the room.

Brian instantly turned up his people pleasing smile and waved at the youth, Rog couldn’t be arsed, while Freddie cocked an eyebrow and John took a pointed swig of his whiskey.

“Hi, I really liked the show. I’m a big fan.” The young man tittered, batting his eyes.

“Thanks, mate.” Roger forced a half-smile. Which really meant: _Great, now get out of our dressing room._

But the young man didn’t go, instead he reached out and laid a hand on Mimì’s leg, the bare one lying flopped over the side of the couch tiredly, the bloke’s hungry eyes going directly to the young teen's crotch as he gave that soft thigh a squeeze.

John watched aghast, mouth half-open, as the teen’s eyes widened, his glossed mouth popping open a little in shock as well.

“Are you busy, cutie? “ That hand started moving higher. “I’ve got a place we can go to have some real fun.”

The youth’s smile was something else entirely in that moment, not shy or nervous, something more _predatory._

John was instantly back in 1970.

_He could see it: another bloke’s hand being laid on Freddie’s thigh, while they were drinking at a pub after a near-empty show. The bloke was such a sleazy bugger that it prompted Freddie to cock an eyebrow and scowl. “Can I help you, dear?”_

_“Yeah, can you even give a proper blowie with those tusks?”_

_John had been shocked, unable to do anything as Freddie blushed uncomfortably, heart sinking with deep-seeded shame and embarrassment at his teeth, at his sexuality, at his general appearance. Those were the days before Freddie would have taken the sodden wanker by the balls and torn him a new one. They were young. They were unknown. They were naive._

John did now, what he should have done then.

As a familiar uncomfortable red flush spread across Mimì’s cheeks, the bassist rose to his feet, his eyes ablaze.

He shoved the nasty bloke hard in the chest, using the strength that he didn’t think he still possessed, enough to send the man stumbling backwards, nearly tumbling straight onto his arse, his dark eyes grown huge with shock.

“If you touch my child again, I’ll tear that tiny _thing_ off.” He growled, a frightening pitch to his voice that he rarely sported. Mimì’s arms were instantly wrapped solidly around his waist and John barely felt them there, not until he was forced back into his seat and there was a sleepy blonde with little red shorts climbing into his lap.

_“Thank you, Uncle Deaky.”_

A small whispered breath, a sigh.

  
_“The wasted years, the wasted youth_  
_The pretty lies, the ugly truth_  
_And the day has come where I have died_  
_Only to find, I've come alive.”_

  
“Dr. Hutton?”

_“He’s rather chubby for a gymnast, isn’t he?”_

“I was just wondering…”

_“If you can pinch an inch…”_

“…if you had any tips on…”

_“Freddie, do you have a comment on your son’s **weight problem**?”_

“…staying in shape for digs?”

_“Oh, I’m competing against the pregger boy? Ha!”_

“Or if we should…”

_“They’re going to cut you off the team if you don’t lose the spare-tire, Jumbo.”_

“…condition for a few months beforehand?”

_“Nice gut, fatass.”_

Mimì swallowed sharply and forced a smile, watching as Max, one of his dig team, tugged uncomfortably at his hoodie. His warm cacao gaze dialed-in unconsciously at the boy's collar, where the flash of an ACE wrap caught the professor's eye as the brunet tugged the rumpled hoodie downwards viciously. _Oh no. Oh shit._

“I usually start preparing…

_“I’m not hungry.”_

“…for the altitude first.”

_“I have the flu or something.”_

“It depends on where the dig is.”

_“Look, unless my body impacts yours with my dick in your ass, it’s none of your goddamn business how I look.”_

The tabloids were the best.

The Sun’s _Mimì Mercury’s Weight Problem, Chubby Freddie Jr._ and later on _Is Baby Mercury Sick? Is Mimì Mercury Anorexic? Is Mimì Seriously Ill? Mercury Quits Gymnastics Under Illness Rumors: Freddie In Shock._

The Daily Mirror’s _Baby Mercury’s AIDS, Is Mimì HIV-Positive?_ and _Gymnastics Star Turned Overweight Uni Professor: Why Has He Let Himself Go?_  That last lovely headline was a new one he'd spotted on the street the other day. Along with many, many others. He didn’t really care anymore.

_(He had as a young teen, crying into the bathroom mirror and analyzing his body, seeing everything the reporters had oh-so-helpfully pointed out, everything that was wrong._

_His thick thighs, his bum, the small pooch of his tummy, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong...)_

He was actually happy with himself _as he was_ for once.

He still remembered how distraught Roo had been that day, when he’d found Mimì on his bruised knees next to the toilet, the porcelain rim covered in droplets of his own esophageal blood.

He’d promised himself and a sobbing Rufus that he’d never do it again.

And he kept that promise.

  
_“I wanna drink until I ache_  
_I wanna make a big mistake_  
_I want blood, guts, and angel cake_  
_I'm gonna puke it anyway…”_

  
Mimì took assiduous notes with a cupcake-patterned glitter pen. 

Staying up into the stillest and dewiest parts of the morning in bed, trying to determine the health benefits and detriments of a piece of clothing he was never going to wear. 

 _Underworks_ seemed to be the most frequently used company for such needs, but commonly used didn't always mean best. _(And Max deserved the best)._ So Mimì explored options provided by _gc2b Transitional Apparel_ and _Design Veronique_ , as well as companies like _XBODY_ and _Danaë._ A few of those binders were crazy pricy, but the cost wasn't exactly a deciding factor for him. Not like they were for most people _(not like they were for Max, who deserved so much better)._

There was never a question as to whether or not Mimì was going to buy _(so so so)_ many fucking binders for Max. 

The issue actually inlaid with the mechanics of it: how to do it and then how to get the shy boy to take them without a low-down dirty fight on the matter.

Yup. _Tedious as fuck._

Binders also had to be the right size in order to do their job. Yet he couldn't exactly walk up with a tape-measure and hold it up to the fullest part of Max’s chest.

In the end, he decided to just guesstimate.

And he went with shorter binders from Underworks and longer binders from XBODY. In all manner of colors, the usual nude _(in Max's actual skin tone, which was more of a caramel macchiato than a white chocolate frap)_ , black and white, along with a few cuter patterned ones. _(Fireworks, turtles, stars, ice-skates, notebooks and little dripping fountain pens, to name a few)._ He wasn't sure if a binder was something the boy might want to wear in place of a t-shirt or as something semi-visible. 

But he deserved to have that option if he wanted it.

 

 _“I wish I wasn't such a narcissist_  
_I wish I didn't really kiss_  
_The mirror when I'm on my own_  
_Oh God, I'm gonna die alone.”_

  
Max cried, legitimately _cried_ , when his former professor turned paleontological dig supervisor and friend handed him the cardboard box, knowing full well what the label meant.

“How did you? I never said… I’m not even on T.” _I can’t pass for shit, Dr. Hutton…_

Decorum or not, Mimì hugged the younger boy tightly, feeling the too-tight wrap press against the dozen rings on his fingers. _Could the poor boy even breathe in that makeshift corset?_

“Hey,” He gently coaxed the boy into looking up at him with teary eyes, the box cradled against his chest. “It was an honor to give you your first set of armor.” Max looked so confused, gnawing at his bottom lip and scrubbing at his eyes in a way that made him look far younger than his twenty-four years.

“What?”

The young professor rapped on the box. “ _These_ of course.” Flashing his wide lip-glossed smile. “You know, it really isn’t fair that some boys get to wear armor.”

Max sobbed loudly and held onto him like a drowning man in the middle of a corpulent sea.

Mimì was humming a new song under his breath, trying to soothe the boy who wept into his collar, fighting the urge to snap open that bloody ACE wrap and throw it miles away.

“Please don’t bind like this anymore.” He whispered softly into Max’s coconut-scented dark hair that tickled his nose, fingers running over the bandages, they were pulled so tight that he winced. “Bandages are for _broken things_ , for _healing_. Max, you _aren’t sick_ and you sure as hell _aren’t broken_.”

“Don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise.”

  
_“Adolescence didn't make sense_  
_A little loss of innocence_  
_The ugliness of being a fool_  
_Ain't youth meant to be beautiful?”_

 


	5. You got blood on your face

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Is that??? OH MY GOODNESS... IT IS!!!! A hint of P L O T!!!!!!
> 
> I know, I can barely believe it. ;)
> 
> A million thanks and my firstborn to my beta and queen @makesteverogersproud!!!!! Give a million thanks to her!!! I love my amazing badger babe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quote authors are either mentioned in text, or below: We Will Rock You by Queen and the Hyacinthus quote by Omar Khayyám. 
> 
> The *** asterisks denote a dream sequence with graphic death and blood, pretty gruesome. So if you want to skip it, just skip to the next asterisks ***. :) 
> 
> Also the kid's science songs referenced below ARE REAL!!!
> 
> Links!!
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JdWlSF195Y
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7zo2zY1Zqg
> 
> THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS!!!! :DDD

  
If J.M. Barrie’s fairies were born from the first laughs of chubby babies, innocence escaping in melodies shaking free from their hearts, and the golems of Jewish lore were sculpted from clay and spoken into life by men, surely it wasn’t too much of a stretch to say that Brian May wrote Freddie Mercury’s only child into existence.

  
“ _Buddy, you're a boy, make a big noise_  
 _Playing in the street, gonna be a big man someday…”_

  
It was what Freddie thought about as he stared into the crowds, every time he sang those bloody anthems to a roaring beat of hands and feet. He thought about the tiny, red, caterwauling thing that had been pressed into his arms what always felt like mere days before, but was actually several years past. Tufts of angry blonde hair standing up on end like a lion’s mane, with a uproarious cry to match. Those inquisitive newborn blue eyes, that wouldn’t darken for days, studying the world. His baby boy.

His only child.

When he had nothing left to hold onto, Freddie held onto his sun.

Then Mimì let go too early, scorching up the world in his wake, and Freddie was left floating, weightless, lost out of his sun’s orbit and spinning away into nothingness.

So he wasn’t there anymore, when his boy looked back.

  
“ _You got mud on your face, you big disgrace_  
 _Kicking your can all over the place, singin’…”_

  
Six-year-old Rufus Tiger Taylor was sniffling as he ran over, his denim overalls dripping in thick tarry mud and hot tears welling up in his big blue eyes.

The little boy just barely managed to bury his red round cheeks in his father’s black trousers, before letting loose with his loud hiccuping wails.

The drummer had been half-dozing on a splinter-filled lawn chair with a cold beer, basking in the glow of Freddie’s aptly nicknamed Duckingham Palace.

Their Fred was lying on the grass with his head pillowed on Jim’s fuzzy chest, lazily sunbathing and stretching out his legs, not unlike the cat he secretly was.

Brian was reclining back in his own lawn chair, reading and waving to a blushing Anita, who was wading in the gently lapping water, it climbed up to the knees of her rolled-up trousers with the waves. A few of John and Roger’s younger children joined her in the surf with compulsory shrieks and giggles.

John himself was completely asleep, conked out and dead to the world in rare form, with his head pillowed in Ronnie’s lap. She was cooing with enduring devotion in her light eyes, as she carded her fingers through his short hair, her wedding ring glinting prettily in the sunlight.

Their large, ever-growing blended family was spread out all over the estate, so Roger had had no problem with sending off his eager younger boy and Freddie’s to play at a local park, only a handful of paces away.

Obviously a mistake given the little blond child sobbing into his aching knees.

Roger wasted no time dragging his younger boy into his arms and kissing the crown of his head, cuddling the little Gremlin close to soothe him.

“What’s wrong, lovie? What happened? Are you alright? Did you fall down?” His questions were that of any worried father and came in an indecipherable volley.

Poor Rufus merely shook his head, blinking his wet eyes owlishly. “ _He_ pushed me.” His little boy’s voice was tinny and small.

_He._

Roger whipped his head around, eyes narrowed as he searched out Mimì, finding an easily blamed and most likely culprit in Freddie’s tiny hellion.

The younger boy was sullenly walking towards them, hands buried in his pockets and dripping in even more mud than Rufus. He looked far older than his barely six years.

“Who pushed you, Tiger?” His voice tender, but edged with razorblades.

Suffice to say, the drummer fully expected it to be the littlest Mercury.

The sullen, smart-mouthed little boy who had come into their world with an honest effort to throttle it in his soft newborn hands. All his and Freddie’s worst traits staring right back at him from a round and toothy child’s face. How so much attitude was packed into that fun-sized body, Roger would never know.

“A big boy on the playground, but Mimì made him cry after.”

Rufus whipped his head around to beam that sunshine smile at his best-friend, the younger boy returned it. Roger instantly felt his heart sink with guilt, because when Mimì smiled with Freddie’s teeth, their Baby Mercury looked right adorable and even his age for once.

_Why was he always assuming the worst of his best-mate’s only child?_

Freddie was instantly kneeling by his son, dampening his knees and dirtying his hands with mud as he twisted the boy’s face this way and that, scrutinizing him critically from head-to-toe. “Did he push you as well, darling?”

The spitfire nodded and Fred made a horrible peeping noise before he tugged his little child into his embrace, safe and warm. Yet the six-year-old whimpered instead of being comforted, it hung in the air for a moment before the boy could properly smother it.

One delicately sculpted eyebrow climbed up into Freddie’s hairline. “What was that, dear? What did you _do?”_

The boy stared scathingly at the frontman as though he’d just gone soft in the head. There it is, Roger thought once more, the real _Mimì Xerxes Hutton_.

“I pushed him back _harder.”_

  
_“We will, we will rock you!”_

  
Rufus found his best-friend in the bathroom shortly afterwards, scrubbing the mud off his face, his pink stained pants puddled up around his ankles and exposing his gushing knee.

The older blond was absolutely horrified.

Rivulets of crimson blood were cutting little rivers through the caked-on mud. The scary cut was long and deep, running from one side of his patella (his kneecap) to the other, cutting through muscle and tissue, revealing white bone beneath.

It also seemed to be horrendously painful, visible in the way Mimì was standing funny, putting more weight on his left side than the right.

“Y-You’re bleeding!” Rufus all but wailed, unable to do so much as blink or tear away his gaze, his frantic eyes following the blood trails as they oozed down into the pink puddle of his best-friend’s trousers. The effect seemed to be lost on the tinier blond however, as he merely looked over at Rufus with pinched annoyance, before nodding with a shrug and pointing at a little carton on the counter.

“Uh huh, I know. I’m gonna put a bandaid on it.”

“But I can see your insides, Blankie!” Rufus was crying again with a touch of frustration, he was six years old after all, sniffling pathetically from the sight of the gouge on his best-friend’s leg. It looked bad. Really, really bad.

But Mimì only rolled his eyes fondly and shook the box. “ _Bandaids_ , Roo.” As if the older boy was being silly.

Then he realized how the other boy was practically dissolving into sobs, arms wrapped around his tummy and looking ten kinds of afraid. Instantly, guilt was painted across the younger’s face like a Van Gogh painting, and he hastily limped over to flung his arms around the older’s middle, enveloping the ones already there. “I’m okay, it’s okay.”

“Doesn’t it _hurt?”_ Rufus’ bottom lip trembling at the thought of Mimì being in pain.

The little boy sucked on his jutting front teeth the way he always did when he was hiding something, or he was nervous. So Rufus, knowing full well about all his best-friend’s little quirks and ticks, gave him a pointed look until he sighed. “A little bit.”

“What happened?” His eyes were still watching the mud-caked wound, tacky with dried blood and God only knows what else mixed in.

Rufus never claimed to be the most observant bloke in the world, and he never would. But surely, he would have noticed Mimì slicing up his leg that badly in front of him. Wouldn’t the boy have yelled or cried? It looked so, so painful and the stubborn younger boy was shaking like a leaf, from where he clung to the porcelain sink to support his less than imposing frame.

“I think I fell on top of an open soup-can when that boy pushed me.”

Apparently not.

The younger boy slid down until he was sitting on his bum, blotting at the wound with a fistful of guaze. Rufus just stared.

Had his best-friend always been so _small?_

He looked so little, so fragile when he was covered in blood on the tile, Rufus had never seen his unconquerable Mimì be so… _tiny._

Mimì was born to be larger than life.

Everyone always said that Mimì was different and treated him so, but Rufus only caught flashes of that otherness. And all they did was make him love the younger boy more, like when he was lying on the ground of the local park, with a mean-faced teenager standing over him, who had to be thirteen or fourteen at least and he was so scared. Suddenly, there was Mimì, standing over him protectively with those little arms stretched out wide and a fierce set to his pouty mouth.

_‘Hey! Leave him alone!’_

_The teen sneered, leering down at the dangerous thing in front of him. ‘Ja? Was willst du dagegen tun?’_

_Yeah? What are you going to do about it?_

Rufus was instantly resolute in his desire to save Mimì in return, and he did his best to force the younger boy to stay put on the messy tile. “Stay here, okay? I’m gonna get my Daddy.” But before he could go, the younger blond lunged forward desperately and snagged him with both hands, holding on with all his might.

“No! He’ll tell Baba!” Blanket started crying, but it was quiet, not like Rufus’ usual hiccuping wails and sobs, desperate for comfort. The tears cut through the dirt that Mimì couldn’t properly scrub away earlier with his dirty hand-towel.

“So? He’ll fix it. That’s what Daddies do.” It was his first vague inkling that his own relationship with his Daddy wasn’t the same as Blanket’s with his Baba.

The little boy was fervently shaking his head to the contrary, looking as sad and pathetic as could be. “He’ll be mad, ‘cause they’re busy… I don’t wanna bother him.” Sucking on his front teeth and hugging his arms to his chest, sniffling quietly.

They had gone to record, but Mimì needed help, they were so out of their depth.

“But you’re _hurt!”_ Later Rufus would learn that the indescribably painful emotion he was experiencing was that of his heart breaking. Just the thought of Blanket being hurt and sad, so very lonely, made his heart clench.

“Don’t tell, Roo! I mean it, _please don’t tell!”_

He hated it, but he promised.

Ten years later, he held Mimì to his chest in the same bathroom, the acrid smell of vomit in the air and the younger teen sobbing into him for all he was worth.

“Don’t tell, Roo!” He wept. “I mean it, _please don’t tell!”_

He hated it, but he didn’t.

And by all fucking hell, he wished he had.

  
_“Buddy, you're a young man, hard man_   
_Shouting in the street, gonna take on the world someday…”_

***

Freddie used to have these horrible nightmares.

His grown son lying on the cold London pavement, with a bullet in his gut and bloody sputum frothing at his lips. 

Bleeding out whilst war waged around him. 

His precious boy looked so puzzled as he lay there, his head pillowed on Rufus’ trembling lap, blond curls worn natural for once and haloing about his head like a painted saint, perhaps St. Sebastian the Martyr. Because it didn't hurt, the boy was warbling that over and over to a sobbing Rufus, his ghostly eyes locked onto Freddie’s.

_Isn’t getting shot supposed to hurt, Baba?_

He had a hole in his belly the size of a quarter, but you'd think it was bigger given the sheer amount of blood that he'd lost all over the front of his blazer. Dressed like a schoolmarm for God's sake. His shirt covered all the most important bits and held none of his usual inflammatory statements. It looked like something Brian would wear while lecturing at Imperial. So it was funny really.

His son been out for a little birthday date with Rufus post a Queen concert, it was why he was dressed so nicely, but since birthdays with a family as big as theirs tended to be more of a birthday-week sort of deal, he'd wanted to make sure it was okay. That they hadn't encroached on anyone else's plans. 

Sometimes the nightmare started before the gunshot.

He and Rufus about a block away from the Queen concert after-party when someone called out from behind them. 

“Oi, Freddie Mercury!” 

Mimì turned around with a reflexive apologetic smile to shout back that no, he was Freddie’s son. That his father was probably still at the party. That it was okay, a lot of people were confused by the identical features and smile. 

Freddie only saw the glint of the glock's barrel for an instant before a bullet tore through his son’s belly. 

Rufus had screamed, the guy had fled. 

Leaving Mimì lying on the pavement and probably dying. 

_It really doesn’t feel all that bad, Baba._

It just felt so oddly warm all over and an uncomfortable sort of wet, the boy was actually worried for a moment that he'd pissed himself. But Rufus had assured him it was just blood. Lots and lots of blood. Roger’s younger boy was crying and Freddie watched as Mimì tried his best to be comforting in his dizzy state. The youth’s ears must have been ringing something terrible, so he only caught snatches of what Tiger was sobbing out, blue eyes wider than Freddie had ever seen them. He was searching frantically for something. 

"...pho... where... fuck... no. no. no..." 

Roger’s younger son searched and searched. But his pockets came up empty. They always came up empty.

_Phone._

Dim levels of clarity flooded his son’s face as Rufus dug Mimì’s own beat-up red iPhone out of his pocket, ironically covered in stickers from protests, digs and concerts past, but it was deader than dead. He'd forgotten to charge it that morning.

There was a crowd now, Freddie would always find himself standing among them. People yelling, shoving, trying to help but doing nothing of the sort. Watching as Rufus’ blood-slick arms slid underneath his son’s knees and back. 

"...ambulances... near... just a... carry...our Dads’... concert..." 

Mimì couldn't track the bursts of sound anymore.

Freddie always saw how his brow scrunched up, how it must have hurt to think, worse than the bloody hole in his little boy’s tummy. So the youth just stopped thinking and then stopped seeing once Rufus lifted him up and into his arms. The world around them swam sickeningly, tilting on its axis. Blacking out like spilt paint dripping down the edges.  

No matter how delicate or careful Rufus, and Freddie’s ghostly arms, tried to be. Mimì still bounced as they ran. Mimì looked up at his father with the same gummy grin he’d sported as a baby, pointing out that it sort of felt like being in one of those blow-up bouncy houses and getting knocked to the floor by one of his cousins, maybe fiercely competitive Lola or clumsy Josh. Then just laying there as they continued to jump all around, his body getting periodically thrown up into the air, completely outside of his control. 

"...please... help... my best-f… shot..." 

There were colored lights flashing across the limp youth’s milky eyes, leaving afterimages in their wake once he dared to crack them open. Splashes of red and blue.

It reminded Freddie of lazy Saturday's with Phoebe, Jim, Joe and their little devil, finger-painting and making an absolute mess of the house just because they could. He remembered his son laugh-screaming, the smile on his lips belaying any harsh feelings.

Mimì smiled again as he bled out, despite how hard it was getting to breathe through the blood congealing in his throat. Freddie could see him struggling and it hurt worse than being impaled himself.

"...permit..." 

What? Mimì blinked dreamily up at his best-friend and father, as well as the worried faces around them. He felt so floaty. A harsh tug on his hair brought him to clarity for just a moment and he heard Rufus’ voice ring true. 

"Do you permit it?" 

_For me to leave you on this gurney?_

_To leave you in the charge of these paramedics?_

_To leave you alone?_

_To go get help without you?_

_To say goodbye?_

Not for the first time, Freddie wondered if he’d given his son the wrong name.

Because in the same breath as _Mimì_ of _La Bohème_ , his boy was _Enjolras, Hugo’s Savage Antinous_.

‘ _A pontifical and warrior nature, strange in a youth. He was officiating and militant; from the immediate point of view, a soldier of democracy; above the movement of the time, a priest of the ideal.’_

But he was also _Icarus_ mid-fall in all of Freddie’s nightmares. Young, brave, beautiful Icarus who flew too close to the sun.

‘ _Never regret thy fall, O Icarus of the fearless flight_  
 _For the greatest tragedy of them all_  
 _Is never to feel the burning light.’_

Or so said Wilde.

Although it was plain to see that Mimì was always a veritable _Hyacinthus_ in Rufus’ eyes.

Apollo’s lover, the fair human boy who he became besotted with and claimed as his own. One day he tried to teach the boy to throw a discus, so that they could play together. But Zephyrus of the winds grew jealous, as he too loved Hyacinthus. The wind deflected the discus and flung it back to hit Hyacinthus in the head and fatally wound him. Out of his spilled life-blood there grew a flower, the hyacinth.

_‘I sometimes think that never blows so red_   
_The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled;_   
_That every Hyacinth the Garden wears_   
_Dropt in its Lap from some once lovely Head.’_

Mimì visibly used all the core strength he had left in him to jackknife upwards and kiss his best-friend. Rufus tasted like bazooka bubblegum and the younger boy’s own spilt blood that still spotted the older's face in oblong specks, or so he told the crowds with wistful breath.

Then he looked straight at Freddie, as he always did in every horror-filled last moment, his lips and teeth dripping in death’s calling card as he smiled.

_“I’m just like you.”_

Then the image would shift to become a distorted parody of his son with soft skin dotted in Kaposi's Sarcoma, sporting the same eerie smile and an IV tunneling into his chest from who-knows-where.

_“I’m just like you.”_

His son with a needle of bubbly yellow-orange heroin sticking out of the crook of his elbow, his pupils dilated from lines upon lines of cocaine and that doozy smile.

_“I finally beat you, Baba.”_

His son was tiny, all of six years old again with his scuffed shoes and the tufts of funny hair that never stayed slicked down, pointing across the autumn field of fallen leaves.

Freddie screamed himself awake, when he found himself staring at his son’s wrecked motorcycle, the _Triumph Bonneville_ he was so proud of and had mostly built himself. Freddie wouldn’t look any more or any farther into the distance, he wouldn’t allow himself to see that mangled body.

“ _I finally beat you.”_

***

“ _You got blood on your face, you big disgrace_  
 _Waving your banner all over the place.”_

  
Rufus was laying in bed with a sleepy Mimì during yet another sleepover, clad in little more than his boxer shorts riding up his arse and a greasy shirt from a place called _Al’s Diner_ , one that he couldn’t remember ever stepping foot in, let alone buying merchandise for.

The vertebrate paleontologist cuddled up beside him was wearing a pair of black lacy panties, a tie-dyed tank top from _Joe’s Crab Shack_ and one solitary rubber-duck themed sock as he read his latest geek fodder: _End of the Megafauna: The Fate of the World's Hugest, Fiercest, and Strangest Animals._ Sporting a hairless kitty curled up like a cinnamon roll on his belly and one of those cheap tourist trap shark tooth necklaces clasped around his throat. Mimì kept tugging on it absentmindedly, as he flipped through the glossy pages of his newest encyclopedia.

He only looked over when he realized that Rufus was staring with that dopey grin on his lips.

“What?”

“You’re beautiful.”

Rufus made it a point to tell it to the younger man as often as he could. The soft smile and gentle flush he received were well worth the compliment.

“ _Cute,_ now what do you want?”

The drummer looked away guiltily, gnawing on his bottom lip. “How do you know I want something?”

A self-assured small hand, adorned with sea-foam green varnished nails, ran under his bottom lip until he released it with a little pop.

For not the first time, Rufus wished he could love the young man before him, in every way he deserved. But Mimì didn’t look at him with blame, instead only with his muted devotion and visible love swirling in his dark eyes, like a hint of peppermint from the dip of a candy cane in hot chocolate. “Because I know you.”

His book was laid across his round thighs, the tops coated in silver stripes that caught the light as he gave Rufus his full and undivided attention.

“Well…” The youngest Taylor boy drawled. “You know how I usually go on tours with my Dads and the Old Ladies? To act as my Dad’s backup?”

Mimì’s eyes narrowed with suspicion, but he did nod.

“So there’s this Festival Tour coming up over the summer, it’s just a few months and since I know you aren’t teaching this summer…”

Those pouty lips were pressed into a tight line, eyebrow raised in a knowing way. “You want me to come? And be what, a groupie? Like when we were little?”

Rufus rubbed the back of his neck and winced at what he knew was coming.

“I was thinking more of as… _Freddie’s backup?”_

Complete silence.

Mimì wasn’t looking at him anymore, he was staring at some spot off in the distance. When he did speak, his voice was quiet and oh-so-tight. “What about Rodgers or Ellis?”

“It’s just Queen this time, no one else. Just Dad, Uncle Freddie, Uncle Bri and Uncle Deaks.”

“And us.” Mimì’s somber eyes widened at what he’d said and the later part of what Rufus had. “They got _Uncle Deaky_ to play?” John, who had been in and out of retirement since the early 90s. Rufus nodded, raising his arm as a subtle wish and soon enough, angry or not, there was a warm body on his hip, merlot hair tickling at his nose. Mimì smelled like cherries.

“He and Brimi have backup too, but I said I’d talk to you about it.”

“Wait, so they want me?” Mimì’s voice was so incredulous that it made Rufus sad. “Me? I don’t think Freddie has heard me sing since that brief stint in choir as a boy.” Then he could practically hear the other boy’s eyes narrowing. “…What did you tell them?”

“The truth? That you’re a bloody amazing singer and they’d be lucky to have you.”

His best-friend and soul-mate rolled over to groan into the soft duvet below them. “Correction.” He said, muffled into the blankets. “That the audience will be more forgiving of a non-Queenie singing lead because I’m Freddie’s by-blow.”

_“Blanket!”_

The boy rolled over to look him dead-on, eyes bright as ever. “Well, it’s true innit? That or they’ll skin me alive for the same.”

He was losing ground and losing it fast.

Rufus was left with his only card, the last ace of spades in his deck, the one he didn’t want to play, but he did anyway. Because he knew that if he could just get Freddie and Mimì, _(or hell, Mimì and all their Uncles)_ , in the same place for a few weeks with no easy escape, they could start to work through years upon years of misunderstandings and tension that everyone was too stubborn to try and mend. _(Or they would kill each other)._

Rufus Tiger Taylor was ready and willing to take that risk.

“Your Dad thinks this will be his last tour, he didn’t even want to do this one, but Uncle Brimi convinced him.”

There it was, his last chip.

His only chip really.

Banking on the fact that it didn’t matter how many times Mimì’s fragile heart was roughed up or stepped on by the people who claimed to love him the most, he still loved his fathers, loved them more than anything. He loved them with everything he had.

He loved Freddie with everything he had, even if it was from a distance.

And even the vaguest inkling of his father growing too old to do the one thing he loved most, would be like an emotional atom bomb going off in Mimì’s chest.

Rufus continued, really laying it on thick. “He can’t jump around like he used to. He can work the crowd yeah, but he can’t really do it while singing anymore. It’s really hard on him, Blanket.” He needs you. It went unsaid, but they had been in each others’ back-pockets for a lifetime, so Mimì knew. Of course he knew.

The paleontologist swallowed roughly, around a mouthful of words he would never say, and pulled his knees to his chest, trying to be flippant but failing miserably.

“It’s not my fault our Dads decided to have us at the ripe old age of forty-something.”

But his careless voice wavered and Rufus watched him melt like a rocket-pop in the sunshine.

The younger bloke rolled over and groaned into the mattress once more.

“So is that a _yes?”_

Another low groan.

“I’m going to take that as a _yes_.”

Mimì flashed him a pair of lovely birds flying in the sky.

“And you know, I think your Dad’s already subscribed to your YouTube channel… So he’s definitely heard you sing recently.” Complete with a shit-eating grin as the younger blond stiffened, like he’d just been electrocuted.

“He’s what?” The boy looked as serious as Rufus had ever seen him. “Roo, are you saying my father’s subscribed to my _Science Music for Kids_ YouTube channel? Really?” The _no way_ afterwards was implied.

It was called _Little Mad Scientists (despite him beginning every video with a ‘Hello, my little rad scientists!’)_ and Rufus had never seen anything more adorable than his best-friend jamming and singing songs about scientific phenomena, ones that he’d written himself with a little hand-drawn animation video accompaniment. He would sketch them on his tablet between classes. The blush that covered those round cheeks was well-worth the teasing.

“Yeah, I think _The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas_ is his favorite. Mine’s _I Am A Paleontologist._ So tell me, have any of your college students found out your deepest darkest secret?” He lowered his voice to a stage-whisper “…That you moonlight as the new _Bill Nye: The Science Guy.”_

Now Rufus wasn’t necessarily expecting the pillow-facilitated blow that nearly had him toppling off the side of the bed, those duck-feathers were hard as shit, but he was damn near ready to give back as good as he got afterward.

Even if it meant having a low-down, dirty pillow fight at the ripe old age of twenty-five.

  
_“You got mud on your face, big disgrace_   
_Somebody better put you back into your place, do it!”_

 


	6. For I am a miracle child

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Song featured is Miracle Child from Joseph: King of Dreams. :D
> 
> Here it is guys!!!! A tad more plot and THE explanation chapter, since so many people have wondered about Freddie living in this universe and why Mimì was born in 1991. :)
> 
> As usual: This story never happened, Freddie never had a son as far as we know. He did lose his life to this nefarious disease and we all have a duty to educate ourselves and those around us on how to stay safe and find effective treatment. <3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So in this chapter I cover a little bit of my own science geek madness. 
> 
> And the defect mentioned and the methods of treatment both do honestly exist and people have been cured from HIV because of it! It's not a good treatment for everyone, because of both HLA matching and the little amount of people with the defect that provides resistance. But while statistically improbable, it is scientifically possible. Below I will link some articles and papers on the genetic defect and potential cure, if you're curious. :) 
> 
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3754463/
> 
> http://www.bloodjournal.org/content/122/18/3111?sso-checked=true
> 
> https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/viruses101/hiv_resistant_mutation
> 
> https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2018/11/cord-blood-hiv-cure.html
> 
> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050325234239.htm
> 
> Also Dinosaur Documentary!!!
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9qyJbw8b6k&t=2046s

“ _A brightly shining star,_  
_Where there was none,_  
_You have granted us a son._  
  
_Dreams do come true,_  
_Look at you…”_

 

  
Mimì hated a lot of things about his both _often-policed_ and _heavily-critiqued_ body, but his tattoos were not one of them.

Which was probably why he had so many.

He and Rufus shared two: matching small, yet thickly lined, pound signs on the ring fingers of their right hands, and a five-pointed crown on the insides of their left wrists. Simple, understated, and their first tattoos ever. Rufus had also gotten a handful more, sprinkled all around his body. But nothing like Mimì, who rocked a pair of detailed and painstakingly done sleeves.

The professor had his whole right arm, wrist to shoulder, dedicated to his life’s work. A detailed thick and black _Allosaurus_ skeleton on the inside of his elbow, an airbrush stylized _Archaeopteryx_ complete with feathers on his outside forearm, a brand wrapping all the way around his bicep _(sketched himself)_ complete with early cretaceous foliage, a trilobite and a T-Rex, with everything interconnected, and finally a flesh and blood _Wendiceratops pinhonensis_ , colored and labeled on the inside of his forearm stretching to the end of his wrist.

His left arm, in contrast, was etched lovingly with tattoos that were very personal to him. The inside of his forearm was an old compass complete with a lovingly shaded map as a background, there was also a ribbon on the outside of his bicep, twirled into the shape of Freddie to the knowledgable observer with mic in hand and head tilted backwards. But that wasn't all, on the outside of his forearm was a _cancer_ constellation, with a little _’39_ on the side of his thumb-forefinger web.

His only other tattoo was the rainbow friendship bracelet wrapped around his left ankle, strings tied together and tassels hanging down.

His _Pride_ tattoo.

His sleeves complimented the dozen or so stacked rings on his fingers and his painted nails quite well, at least he thought so. Rufus often told him so as well.

The pinnacle of fashion right there.

And the reason he insisted on wearing short sleeves and sandals in January.

No matter how long he lived, if he never stepped foot in a tattoo parlor again, he would always remember the way it felt. Being welcomed with open arms and wide smiles, being accepted for who he was, with no questions asked. He was allowed to be unapologetically himself. Which was something his childhood was noticeably bereft of.

He never really _‘came out’._

It was just sort of expected for him to be gay, the same way that most kids were assumed to be straight. Teachers, principals, his peers, his fathers and his fathers’ friends, his whole extended family. As if it was something catching or hereditary, like being a major jackass.

Even Rufus assumed and it was their first and only massive blowout of a fight.

Complete with sex that shouldn’t have been, an entire bottle of _Jose Cuervo_ and enough tears to drown a cat in a kiddie pool.

He still remembered his father standing in the doorway of his bedroom that night, silhouetted perfectly in the lowlight.

“Rog just called, says Rufus is in a right state at his place. What on earth were you two _doing?”_

Sixteen-year-old Mimì Xerxes Hutton had merely taken another swig of cheap tequila. “Fuck off, you old tosser.” He’d coughed around the bruising ache in his ribs and the coat of many colors his skin had become. “You wouldn’t understand a goddamn thing.”

  
_“You are a miracle child,_  
_You are the best,_  
_You shine the brightest,_  
_Your days will be cloudless and mild,_  
_Your trails be blessed,_  
_Your trials the lightest…”_

  
Mimì learned that he’d saved his father’s life, when he was nine years old.

That it was no accident, the way Freddie suddenly got better after he was born.

That it wasn’t willpower or love or magic or even the perfect cocktail of drugs that saved Freddie Mercury’s life.

It was his newborn son’s cord blood and a mutation called _CCR5-delta 32._

His father had banked his sperm as soon as it was possible for him to do so, partially out of duty to Mary. Because, as she’d assured him vehemently, he’d most certainly want a baby one day and she would carry that baby for him. Completely altruistically of course, because she loved him. Even when he’d never really wanted to be a father in the first place.

But his Mum didn’t actually get up the duff with test-tube baby him, until early 1991. When they’d all thought Freddie was going to die. She would tell anyone who would listen, when he was a little boy, that it had been because Freddie and Jim desperately wanted a child. That, wasn’t exactly _true._ They wanted him later, they’d assured him many times. But not when she first got pregnant. _She_ was the one who was desperate, desperate to have a piece of Freddie. One that would stay long after he was gone. It was a selfish decision born of love. And Mimì wished he could fault her for it.

The mutation he was born with, CCR5-delta 32, was a happy accident.

It originated about seven hundred years prior, coinciding with an outbreak of either smallpox or The Black Death. It didn’t matter which, as the mutation instilled a resistance to both illnesses, ergo it kept getting passed on to each subsequent generation. Until finally it ended up doubled in the genetic code of little Mimì Xerxes Hutton as an embryo.

The mutation would cause the CCR5 co-receptors on the outside of his body’s cells to develop much smaller than usual, rendering them practically impotent and no longer placing them outside of the cells. Which meant that pathogens that relied on the CD4 receptors and the CCR5 co-receptors to cripple the body’s own immune system, couldn’t do anything. They couldn’t get into the cells to hijack them, because the CCR5 _(the door to the cell),_ wasn't there and didn’t work if it was. Granting the body immunity to such pathogens.

Such as the smallpox viruses _(Variola major and Variola minor),_ the bacterium that caused bubonic plague _(Yersinia pestis)_ … and the _human immunodeficiency virus_ that caused AIDS.

_(Which would help him in later years, when he became the spleen-less wonder and his immune system took a major hit)._

When Mimì was born, with ten tiny toes, ten tiny fingers and the petulant roar of a lion blasting from his tiny lungs, he was also giving his father a second chance at life. They harvested his umbilical cord blood through standard practice with children fertilized as he was, _in a petri-dish_ , at that time. Only to realize how valuable it was, through the testing to make sure he didn’t carry the HIV virus himself.

He could _never_ carry it.

And that saved his father’s life.

They performed a transplant with his cord blood.

A transplant that was only worth trying because of the mutation in his genes, because of the readily available cord blood and because as his biological father, he and Freddie were a match. _Well, matched enough for cord blood._

No one expected it to _work._

No one expected it to save Freddie’s life.

….But it _did._

Suddenly the frontman of Queen had no viral load, no need for antiretroviral therapy _(shite as it was back then)_ and no AIDS. Through a miracle of nature and science, he would _live_.

The scars would always remain, as transplanted cells could not cure what what already occurred.

But they did give him a _future._

They also gave Mimì a chance to be nine years old in 2000, flinging his arms around his father’s neck, and whispering into the faded silvery scars of Kaposi’s Sarcoma long past: “I’m so glad my blood made you _better.”_

  
_“You were made for better things,_  
_You will share the air of kings,_  
_You were born and fortune smiled,_  
_For you are a miracle child.”_

  
Mimì walked into _Abbey Road_ at the tender age of fifteen, windswept platinum hair flopped over his right eye, his scalp buzzed up with a sky full of stars on the other side.

Dressed in an oversized red jumper over his white collared shirt, short plaid skirt and plain knee-socks over black Mary-Jane’s. _What?_ The headmaster had said that he _“must wear the school uniform to attend classes”,_ the old clot-pole didn’t say it had to be the _boy’s_ uniform.

He leaned against the egg-shell plaster wall, arms folded across his chest to push out his nonexistent muscles, as he watched Freddie and his uncles record backing tracks.

For a moment, just one, he allowed himself to imagine a world without _Frederick fucking Mercury_ in it. A world without a Queen album that popped out every couple years or so. A world without his Dads’ twentieth anniversary party being the red-carpet event of the year. A world without a Roger Taylor who looked far too young and pretty to be in his fifties, without a Brian May who could laugh with every muscle and sinew in his body, feeling things so much harder and deeper than anyone else… joy included, and without a John Deacon getting teased by his friends turned brothers, for growing grey too early and for having more laugh lines than frown lines on his face.

What a worthless, _empty_ world that would be, one existing without love.

“Oh Brimi dear, it’s not a _funeral dirge,_ please do speed it up at some point.” His father pouted, arms crossed and lips pursed from across the room, trapped in his own little snow-globe world.

Mimì stifled a brittle laugh into his sleeve.

  
_“The sun will rise within your eyes,_  
_The moon will light your smile,_  
_And heaven grace your gentle face,_  
_With power to beguile,_  
_You will wade through the river of sorrows,_  
_Warm and dry,_  
_And angels will guide your tomorrows,_  
_This I prophesy.”_

  
He used to have nightmares about it sometimes.

A funeral during his childhood, one held in the Zoroastrian faith that his father was born into and that he was accepted into at the age of seven. _(He could still remember his navjote ceremony as an adult, his Baa teaching him to memorize the Kusti Prayers, tying the Kusti cord around his waist for the first time, then himself on the day: dressed in all white with an enormous smile on his face)._

The funeral was dark, solemn and one in which he was passed around like a veritable torch of mourning.

He was always carried in by his Da as a small boy, his uncombed messy towhead resting gently in the crook of that sweaty neck, hidden by an ugly tie. His face buried so deeply into his shelter, that he couldn't even see the goings on.

But Uncle Rog so often appeared as well, looking entirely too wrecked, vaguely drunk and with trembling arms outstretched, wordlessly taking Mimì and holding him too tight. The little blond never complained though. Not even as he was passed to his Uncle Brimi who smelled like the inside of his father’s medicine cabinet and sobbed into his hair during their hug. He always spent a little while pressed between Brian and Auntie Anita, like some kind of dirty secret.

Then he was often handed a little stuffed white bear, sometimes it was a lily, by his Uncle Elton, who simply hadn’t stopped crying the whole day, lips cracked and eyes downcast with the impossible weight of his grief. Mimì would hug the bear whilst Uncle Deaky held onto him for the remainder of the service, unable to let go.

Unable to let go of all he had left of the man, who had once been _his whole life._

“It’s over.” He would feel Uncle Deaky weep and sob into his hair. “It’s really _over.”_

The child Mimì always shook his head. “No, Uncle Deaky. I think it’s supposed to last longer.” Talking about the _funeral_ of all things.

The innocent little boy that he no longer was.

A wet smile graced his youngest uncle’s broken face. _“I thought so too.”_

  
That dream was so often followed by its twin, an older Mimì losing his Da.

It was always a quiet funeral. Catholic, poignant, and very very different from Freddie’s arrangement. There were no photographers or mountains of flowers. No mourners wailing in the streets, or Mimì trying to remember how to recite prayers long forgotten. Just the strong Irish air filling his lungs, the familiar sound of waves hitting the shoreline and breaking on the sand, and the way that he had never felt more alone.

“Mimì, are you alright?”

He would look up at Phoebe, the old man’s softened features regaling him like he was still that blond bouncing baby boy that he’d dandied on his knee once upon a time. And slowly, Mimì shook his head, sliding his hand into the familiar warm one offered to him.

“My fathers are dead.”

His babysitter, confidante, personal assistant, godfather and good friend all rolled into one, bobbed his head in a little agonized nod. “They are.” His low melodic voice turned thick with grief.

“ _Phoebe,_ ” The youth wailed, startling even himself as he fell into the soft man and hugged him for all he was worth. The knees of his trousers growing damp from where they pressed into the dewy grass below. “My fathers are _dead_ , and I don’t think I ever knew them _at all._ ”

He wasn’t sure how long he cried into the dirt, but at some point the old man pulled away, only to be replaced by the familiar smell of shaving cream and a lick of cologne, cheap when he knew he could afford better.

“Uncle Deaky…” Mimì moaned, like it was a cry for absolution. His uncle refused to let go of him, even as the day turned to dusk. “I’m _alone_.” He whimpered, huskily,

But the older man reprimanded him sharply, his eyes cold yet his words painstakingly soft.

“You are the farthest thing from alone, Mimì and don’t you ever forget it.” _You’re all we have left of him._

It was safe to say that Jim Hutton died long before the cancer that ravaged his body. His soul had died with their Freddie. It was only his body that took so long to come home again.

  
Poor Mimì would often wake up sobbing from those nightmares, dripping in a cold sweat and it was only the cats coming to coo at him, that managed to still his rabbiting heart once more.

  
_“Dearest mother,_  
_Beloved father,_  
_A coat of colors bright as butterfly wings,_  
_To remind me,_  
_Things you've told me all my life,_  
_I am special, I am smart,_  
_I am somehow set apart,_  
_Petty rules and limitations don't apply…”_

  
Rufus came to collect Mimì in the latter part of his lecture at London’s _Natural History Museum_.

The twenty-five year old caught sight of a familiar blond head of hair sidling into the lecture hall through the back and he had to swallow back a grin as he continued on with his layman’s lecture to the children and teens who had come on numerous field-trips to learn about the history of paleontology in Britain. Fuck it all, Mimì was not going to disappoint them.

“Thirty or so years ago, this was found in a Surrey clay pit and it changed paleontology as we know it forever.” He hefted out the heavy clay-darkened claw, bigger than his own hand. One of the little boy’s in the front row squealed with delight at the sight of the massive fossil and covered his mouth with both hands, as if surprised by the sound. Mimì didn’t bother to hide his smile then, fueled by the wonder alight in the eyes of even the most uninterested teens. “Along with this claw, they found half a fully formed skeleton of a dinosaur that they had never seen before. It had a jaw like a crocodilian and the bones to rival a T-Rex.”

“What was it?” A little girl with 90s butterfly clips asked, lisping through her missing front teeth.

He beamed at her. “Almost there, love.” The professor picked up a small white box with a new sort of reverence, showing the orange and blue hued scale to all those who craned their necks for a closer look. “Inside the ribcage of our mystery dinosaur, they discovered this fish scale.”

“It ate fish? Like fish and chips?” Another little boy asked, playing with the zipper on his red jacket. “That doesn’t sound very scary.”

Mimì shook his head with a huffed little chuckle, and thought of another little boy staring up at an _Archaeopteryx_ model with his tiny hand in the clutches of a doting guitarist. “It’s not meant to be scary. It can’t help the way it is. This was actually the first fish-eating carnivorous dinosaur of this size ever discovered in Europe: _Baryonyx.”_

When he allowed them to come up to touch and point, he guided their hands, gentle as could be. “Look how deep the roots of its teeth go, poking at least four inches into the jaw to be immobilized. He had to catch a lot of huge fish every single day to meet his calorie count, hunting around the swamps in Surrey.”

“Silly!” The same little girl laughed, her small hands tapping against the rings on his. “There are no _swamps_ in Surrey!”

“Not now, but there _were,_ millions of years ago.”

She screwed up her little face in pensive thought. “Oh. Then where did they go?”

“They didn’t go anywhere.” He shook more of his merlot hair out of its messy bun by accident, rolling up the sleeves of his lemon-yellow button-down. “They’re still there, the land is the same, it just changed as it grew older. But the same swamps are still there. In fact, it’s because of the swamps that we have coal-forest fossils all over Britain and that we have so many records of the land before time.” His eyes met Rufus’ over the throng of waist-high heads pushing forwards to touch and then marching sadly towards the exit. “Sometimes, you just have to look a little closer at what’s beneath your feet…”

“…At what’s hidden just beneath the surface.”

  
_“For I am a miracle child,_  
_I can't be harmed, I'm wrapped in rainbow,_  
_Though fate can be heartless and wild,_  
_My life's been charmed,_  
_And shall remain so,_  
_I was made for something more,_  
_Not to struggle, but to soar…”_

  
“Please don’t hate me.” Rufus whispered into Mimì’s messy hair, the very moment the hordes of excited patrons had left on the next portion of the tour, with the young, bright-eyed guides gathered to meet them just outside of the lecture hall doors. The professor quirked one dyed eyebrow in suspicion, as that didn’t sound very good. The older blond held him far closer than was necessary, not that the younger had ever minded in the past, but it was quite obvious that Roo stunk of guilt and the arms around him felt more like a restraint.

“What did you do?” Mimì’s glossy lips pressed into a taut line and he tried to pull back his arms to cross them over his chest, but to no avail. He sighed, a smile playing peekaboo in the corners of his lips.

Rufus’ soft blue eyes were oddly pinched around the edges and he was gnawing like a new puppy at the corners of his mouth. Fuck, he only did that when he was really nervous. _“Please, Blanket?”_ His clammy palms brushed against Mimì’s exposed forearms and worry started to consume the annoyance and suspicion in the younger boy’s heart.

“What did you _do?”_ He pressed, eyes filling with concern. _You know I could never hate you, Roo._

He was about to open his mouth and tell his best-friend exactly that, worry straining his voice— when a familiar lilt sounded from a few paces behind them, accompanied by the snap-click of clogs that the bloody fool of a man was far too old to be wearing anymore. Probably tempting fate into breaking his hip. “So you’re a tour guide now, that’s…. _quaint.”_ The word was said in a tone reminiscent of someone saying _thank you, I love it_ for an unwanted gift.

Mimì looked up at his life-long platonic soulmate, betrayal alight in his eyes and shocked hurt oozing out from every pore. “You didn’t.” He whispered, barely an exhale, barely audible.

“I’m sorry.” Rufus whispered furtively at the same decibel level, guilt adorning him like an expensive set of jewels, looking like Mimì had just punched him in the stomach. “It was the only way I could make sure you didn’t _run off_ without a proper meeting.” A piss-poor explanation if there ever was one.

“You _didn’t_.” The whisper turned into a whimper as it passed the younger boy’s lips.

“I’m _sorry.”_ Rufus looked away.

Because he _had._

  
_“To my fortune reconciled,_  
_For I am a miracle child._  
_You won't see me bent over double,_  
_In darkness and rubble,_  
_Where mountains of trouble are piled,_  
_I was destined to fly, watch me light up the sky,_

_For I am a miracle child…”_

 


	7. Lumiere, darling, Lumiere over me…

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More angst yay!!!! :D And a little progression of plot, who would of thought? :P :)
> 
> Also a million thanks to my lovely friend and amazing beta @makesteverogersproud, the only reason this isn't full of grammar mistakes and page-long run-on sentences :)) I love her with all my heart!! <333333
> 
> WARNING: Chapter features some pretty intense drug abuse, if that bothers you please skip the section beginning "One of the only good choices..." :)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Songs are: Tenerife Sea by Ed Sheeran, Mimì's Aria (https://www.liveabout.com/mi-chiamano-mimi-lyrics-and-text-translation-724019) translated version. 
> 
> And Space facts! 
> 
> https://conversationstartersworld.com/space-trivia-questions/

_“You look so beautiful in this light_  
_Your silhouette over me_  
_The way it brings out the blue in your eyes_  
_Is the Tenerife sea…”_

 

  
Freddie told his bandmates, the day after Mary told him, with a bad taste swirling about in his mouth that no amount of vodka or tea could abate.

He was exhausted and it was more than just his illness taking its toll on his weakening body, he and Jim had merely been up for all the night talking about _it._

Their child.

Freddie knew what Jim was imagining, a rosy cheeked baby with dark hair and skin, dimples and frightful teeth. But in his mind’s eye, he saw another fae child, a little one with Mary’s heart shaped face, her soft downy blond hair and Kash’s remarkably expressive eyes.

His miracle.

The miracle that he would either never know, or that he would leave too soon. _(And if their suspicions proved to be correct, then Jim would soon do the same)._ Their child would be an orphan, long before they understood the meaning of the word.

When he’d imagined fatherhood as a younger man, he’d almost dreaded the monotony of it. Oh what a _torment_ , he’d bemoaned — how it would be so _slow and tedious_ to watch a child grow up, day by day, all the little moments of life lost to the sands of oblivion. But now that he had rested a hand on the subtle bump of Mary’s belly that housed his unborn baby, all he wanted to do was be there for that sleeping angel, he yearned to reach for every single moment with his baby and let it stretch on forever.

But the revelation also forced him to acknowledge the truth of his own mortality and he **hated** it.

Freddie knew that he didn’t have much time left, that his every breath was on loan, that every single day he grew a little weaker than the one before.

It somehow took a child to make him realize.

A child who would inherit the kingdom of Queen, but never know the man who had given it to them. A child who would grow up resenting, _representing_ , their absentee father, and unable to embrace the person they only knew from stories, photographs, videos and songs.

Freddie nodded off in the car on the way to the studio in Montreux, and he dreamt of a child with cornsilk blond hair and freckles on his round cheeks, sitting alone on the edge of a cliff. The wind tousling the few stubborn locks of hair that peeked out from beneath the handmade crown on his head, made from taped together golden card-stock and little fake stones of glitter and glue, with a little red cape on his shoulders obscuring his back from view.

A clear and lovely sound pierced the air between them, like a spear, a bullet... the child’s voice.

His child’s _singing voice_.

It was young, delicate and airy like a puff pastry, but hidden within its depths were the threads of a powerful belting range that could, that _would_ , grow up to rival his own. Freddie relished in it, as who better to surpass him than his own child? _His legacy_.

 _“Yes, they call me Mimì, but my true name is Lucia. My story is short. A canvas or a silk…_ ” The child sang into the salty breeze that dampened his round cheeks.

It took Freddie a moment to place them in their juxtaposition, but he soon remembered the source of those words, _La Bohème,_ one of his favorite operas.

Mimì’s introduction was supposed to be sung in Italian, sung by a soprano woman, but the little boy crooned the words in vaguely accented English, almost castrati in his vocal purity.

_So Freddie would raise his boy in London then? …Or somebody would, at least._

The cherub didn’t acknowledge his presence for the longest time, even as Freddie stepped forward, his hand outstretched.

The little baroque child simply swung his chubby legs off the lip of the cliff, while his voice rose and swelled like the tides. _“I am happy and at peace, and my pastime is to make lilies and roses. I love all things that have gentle sweet smells, that speak of love, of spring, of dreams and fanciful things, those things that have poetic names…”_ The boy finally looked up when Freddie’s hand was little more than a hair’s breadth away from his own, enough to catch it and bring it to his icy countenance. _“Do you understand me?”_ He mouthed.

 _Yes._ Freddie ached to cry, _yes!_

_You’re my son._

_My boy_.

The child smiled, to reveal the prominent teeth that could have been a carbon-copy of his own. He climbed into Freddie’s lap, wrapping those precious and birdlike arms around his neck, burying his nose into the fleece blanket that the frontman wore around his shoulders. Freddie, aging long before his time, simply sobbed as the boy trilled into his seashell ear. “ _They call me Mimì, I do not know why. Alone, I make lunch by myself. I do not go to church, but I pray a lot to the Lord. I stay all alone, there in a white room and look upon the roofs and the sky, but when the thaw comes… The first sun, like my first kiss, is mine!”_

All at once, Freddie remembered how Mimì died in the opera.

How her light was snuffed out far too soon in the arms of her beloved.

 _“Lumiere, darling_  
_Lumiere over me…_ ”

A rose in winter, forever frozen and deadened blue.

He pressed the boy closer and gulped as he breathed in the scent of lavender and acrylic paint.

_“Buds in a vase… Leaf and leaf I spy! That gentle perfume of a flower! But the flowers that I make, Alas! no smell. Other than telling you about me, I know nothing…_

_I am only your neighbor who comes out to bother you.”_

When Freddie opened his arms and looked down, the cherub and his haunting melody were gone, leaving only unfettered grief in their place.

  
_“And should this be the last thing I see_  
_I want you to know it's enough for me_  
_'Cause all that you are is all that I'll ever need…”_

  
One of the only good choices he’d made as a kid, the one that Mimì was thankful for now and would probably always be, was never really getting into the hard drugs scene.

God knows that he was exposed to it enough as a child, so much so that it wouldn’t have been hard to start shooting up himself. If he’d ever actually wanted to. Which wasn’t to say that he’d never dabbled, being the dumb punk kid he was, of course he had. But he never did anything more than once, and it was never anything hard. It only took being eight years old and going to the loos at one of Queen’s gigs by himself, to swear off hard shit like coke, acid, crank and smack forever.

He’d stumbled across somebody tweaking on the floor of the farthest stall.

And that sight would never leave him.

He couldn’t remember if he’d screamed for help, or if anyone would’ve even come if he had, watching the skeletal youth writhe on the floor. He was shivering and reeked of sour sweat and acrid vomit, with rivulets of chunky puke oozing down his birdcage chest. Those glassy green eyes lolling and staring past the primary-schooler at nothing at all. The needle sticking out of his arm was rocking to and fro like a buoy in a vast ocean.

Mimì did remember racing out of that bathroom like his life depended on it.

But that image would always spring to the forefront of his mind, when someone offered him a familiar little baggie or a needle, or even a pre-rolled joint or a rainbow handful of pills that he couldn’t identify… he would remember that boy.

That boy he could have grown up to become.

 _But,_ the pained little voice inside reminded him, _that wrecked boy had been smiling, blissed out in his own perfect world._

  
_“I'm so in love, so in love_  
_So in love, so in love…”_

  
_Hey, Uncle Brimi? What’s the coldest part of the universe?_

_The Boomerang Nebula._

_(Your heart, Dr. May)._

The older man had explained to him so gently once, as they’d painted it on the ceiling of their office hideaway together. _It’s part of the Centaurus constellation and it’s far colder, at only one degree Kelvin, than the standard temperature of deep space._

Mimì took a grounding breath, clenched his fists, unclenched them, and jutted his chin in an incremental movement towards the empty lecture hall seats nearby. “ _Rufus Tiger Taylor,”_ It came out both as a growl from the deepest, darkest pits of hell and saccharine sweet. A tone that meant the older blond was about to get his ass handed to him on a silver platter, with a smile. Mimì’s dark eyes looked as tempestuous and homicidal as the Red Triangle astride The Golden Gate Bridge. The reason no inmate ever escaped Alcatraz. “Take _a fucking seat.”_

For a moment, it was evident that Rufus contemplated disobeying the blatant order, so that he could act as a referee to the shit-show that was about to unfold. But when he considered the murderous glint in his best-friend’s obsidian eyes, he seemingly thought better of it and sat himself down with knees curled up to his chest, like a five year old in timeout.

Then Mimì turned to regale his next target with that piercing gaze of his.

Or well, _targets._

Their fathers and uncles had a propensity for traveling in pairs or as a set. So of course Brian hadn’t come alone, their Uncle Deaky flanked him with curious eyes and an apologetic twist to his lips.

Mimì just stared, features caustic, with all the words he could have said in reaction dying a noble death, long before he even managed to open up his mouth.

Brian’s cruel words were angrily wriggling, writhing and coiling around the younger man’s neck like a boa constrictor, mottled scales, muscle and sinew tightening akin to a noose and choking off his air supply.

A battle was brewing, so there was a defiant set to Mimì’s shoulders, hands on his hips, legs in a boxer’s stance and squared up for war.

A tense Rufus Taylor took a seat nearby, anxiously poised, ready to lunge up and help, just in case the battle of the century broke out in front of him.

The last thing any of them expected was for Dr. Brian May, with his plume of silver curls and gentle giant physique if there ever was one, to surge forwards and wrap his long arms around Mimì’s diminutive frame. He embraced the young professor and cuddled him enthusiastically enough for his scuffed converse-clad feet to leave the floor.

Mimì’s eyes were wide and promptly filled with tears, ruddy mouth popped open with shock, words couldn’t express how he felt right about then, nothing could.

The younger professor’s hands flailed and he was cold despite the warmth of the smothering hug, it took far too long for him to force his numb arms to wrap around his uncle’s torso. He clung to the cotton t-shirt like he was a child again.

Brian smelled the same way as he did back then, the slight metallic undercurrent of guitar strings on his fingers stung Mimì's nose, and suddenly he was back in his fond memories.

Sitting on his Uncle Brimi’s shoulders, fingers curled up that pillowy mass of curly hair. _Uncle Brimi? What’s the most common star in The Milky Way?_

Cue a small twitch of knowing lips, that he couldn’t see from so high up. _Red dwarf stars, a bit like baby stars in a way. No one can see them from Earth, not with just our eyes. It’s because our Milky Way is so young… we only have a couple of more advanced stars._

_Our galaxy still has some growing up to do._

  
_“You look so beautiful in this light_  
_Your silhouette over me_  
_The way it brings out the blue in your eyes_  
_Is the Tenerife sea…”_

  
Brian May stared at the young man in front of him.

On first sight, he almost didn’t recognize his nephew. The messy bun of purple-red hair atop his head and the vivid tattoos winding up his arms to disappear into the rolled up sleeves of his yellow button-up, were enough to throw off the older man. Mimì's hands were studded with dozens of glittering rings, and he kept pulling them in and out of the pockets of his khakis, making a game of it all.

Then as Brian got closer, it was easier to hone onto the familiar dark eyes that the younger man had borrowed from their Freddie, that smile and those teeth as well, the threads of gold denoting his natural color growing through the dye.

And he saw the harlequin nail varnish. _White on one hand and black on the other, all these years later and still carrying bits of them both_.

In Brian’s mind, Mimì Xerxes Hutton would forever be an antsy six-year-old eagerly dragging him by the hand to go look at a dinosaur model. All shaggy blond hair and glittery pink shoes, running at the world head-on. _Come on, Uncle Brimi!_

A ten-year-old with a frighteningly bumpy scar across his belly, reaching out to him for comfort through the haze of fever, round face creased with pain and saltwater tears carving wavy paths down his face. _It hurts, Uncle Brimi…_

A sixteen-year-old angry at the world and the fair-weather parents that didn’t understand him, who fought, found, and sought refuge in their planetary studies together. Brian would often pull an unwilling smile from the boy who held them too close to his heart, a little laugh. He taught Mimì all he knew, attempted to assuage the hurt that leaked from the teenager, as if from a weeping open wound. The old man often compared it to how he himself had felt during Hot Space, unneeded, unwanted, and unheard.

Brian would always remember the pain hidden behind layers of eyeliner, punk clothes and hair dye. _Uncle Brimi? Am I smart?_

A twenty-year-old throwing away his future. Destroying the room and everything else they had built together. Brian’s heart had shattered along with that antique telescope, when their screams peeled away the constellations painted on the walls by Mimì’s own tiny child-chubby hand. A symbolic betrayal. Brian had been furious and so unspeakably hurt by the actions of that day and by the mere thought of it all.

How could the little boy that he’d raised with such a deep and visceral love for the night sky, a love strong enough that he had pursued it as a career, suddenly give up on everything?

What, it was just supposed to be _over?_

Mimì was leaving the thing he loved the most in the world behind… and for _what? Fossils? For a career that was going nowhere?_

Brian wouldn’t deny it, he had often dreamed of them working on projects together professionally, in a place like Tenerife. Dreamed of them creating things that were more than just the fruits of pouring over books in the study or cosmos documentaries or building miniature Da Vinci models.

He would never forget the anguish in the broken youth’s eyes as Brian screamed at him to _get out._

He would never forgive himself for the way that Mimì never came back.

 _Mimì really was his father’s son,_ Brian would realize with his heart twisting up in his chest, pierced with a dozen of Apollo’s arrows, _both of them desperately searching for love. Freddie found it in Jim, but Mimì…_

He’d swallowed hard, head in his hands.

_(You, Brian May, have become your father._

_Hope you’re happy now)._

An hours old baby, his cord blood resting in a vial or a clear baggie off in a lab somewhere, stored away for future use... long before they’d known of its true properties. In those first early hours, it had just been _standard practice,_ it had just been _blood_. Brian held an hours old baby with soft downy blond hair that made him look like one of Roger’s children instead of Fred’s, despite the golden hue to his skin and the pouty pink of his lips.

Or so it seemed, until he’d opened up his red licorice mouth and let loose with a wail that could have shattered glass it was so powerful.

That was Freddie’s voice, no doubt about it.

Freddie’s voice gifted to a little boy, a baby who’d spent little more than a handful of hours on this earth.

If Brian believed in God or fate, he would have cried out and shaken his fist at the sky, for daring to give them Freddie’s _replacement._ The last piece of his best-friend, that the frontman — _brother, friend, husband, lover, singer of songs, lover of life, heart of Queen, voice of John, whetstone of Roger, soul of Brian, new father—_ would leave behind.

The first time Brian May held Mimì Hutton, he _hated him_ and everything the innocent child stood for.

But he couldn’t bring himself to let go regardless, and the tears that came unheeded, dripped onto the baby’s forehead and made the tiny creature mewl and squirm in the blankets he was swaddled in. Brian tugged the tiny angel in closer, burying his big nose in those cornsilk locks.

 _I’m so sorry, little lion._ Then, in finally thinking of what the tiny baby in his arms was going to lose in mere months time, his heart clenched as if caught in a vice and he whispered it again, as if a prayer, into the baby’s tiny chest. _I’m so so sorry._

A seventeen-year-old with a bottle of strawberry-scented deep conditioner in one hand and a wide-toothed comb imbued with coconut oil in the other, standing in front of Brian with knowing dark eyes, taking in the salt and pepper beard that grew during his worst of times and the bags evident under his eyes. After the years upon years together, his seasoned bandmates knew all about the depression beard and what it heralded. But it was difficult and near impossible to take the same course of action that they would have in their twenties. They were all well and grown now, nearly elderly, so helping their guitarist through his pain was a lot more like wading into the ocean or diving into a minefield, quite different than it used to be.

Or perhaps it was just dangerous in a different way.

_Hey Uncle Bri? Can I deep condition your hair?_

Mimì curled up behind the older man like a limpet, massaging the conditioner deep into his dirty scalp. It only took a couple of gentle caresses and a kiss to his temple, before the old man was sobbing like a baby, tears irritating his eyes, making them ache and swell in their sockets. Prompting Mimì to wrap his arms tightly around Brian’s far greater frame, rocking him side to side and humming slightly. I _t’s okay, Uncle Brimi. I’ve got you._

 _“And all of the voices surrounding us here_  
_They just fade out when you take a breath_  
_Just say the word and I will disappear_  
_Into the wilderness…”_

Before Brian knew what he was doing, before he could think about his actions or plan out everything, he was surging forwards to enfold the younger man within his arms. The young man who was once his little boy.

 

 _“You look so wonderful in your dress_  
_I love your hair like that_  
_The way it falls on the side of your neck_  
_Down your shoulders and back.”_

 

_How did we miss this?_

Brian had whispered that same thing many times over the course of many many children, but none so much as Mimì. Who despite being the most vocal of Queen’s children by far, seemed to grow up quietly by contrast and earned his achievements in silence. ( _Or perhaps you just never listened hard enough?)_

Once, he picked up Mimì’s jacket off the floor of Freddie’s parlor, grumbling about messy boys, only for a hard gold disk to fall out and roll like an oversized coin on the carpet, before the blue and red starry ribbon hanging off it arrested its movement. It was a medal, on the front it had a raised golden cup and a man standing on his hands. Brian had furrowed his eyebrows and flipped the sizable medal over to read the back, etched there were the words: _British Youth Gymnastics Championships_ , and below were _Men’s Floor-1st_.

“Mimì won a gymnastics competition?” Odd as it sounded. “Why didn’t you let us know? We could’ve rounded up a few of the kids and made day out of it.”

Freddie had snatched the medal out of Brian’s hands, wide-eyed like a deer in the headlights. “I didn’t know.”

The astrophysicist had pursed his lips in disappointment at Fred’s scatterbrained nature. “That he had a competition?”

Freddie slumped onto his couch, just staring at the medal’s shiny surface, face pinched with pain and guilt. “That he did gymnastics.”

Brian didn’t see what happened later, when Freddie brought Mimì’s medal back to him. The boy had exited his bedroom, still wet from his shower with _Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit_ pouring from his stereo. He’d leaned against the doorjamb only to be tugged into his father’s desperate and guilty hold. The old man holding him close and kissing his forehead, as if he were still two years old and craved that affection. “Why didn’t you tell me?” His voice was thick and heartbroken as he passed the medal into the boy’s hands almost reverently.

Mimì looked at the medal askance, almost as if it was a piece of toast or something equally as ordinary or mundane. “Thanks for returning it I guess, not a big deal or anything.” He tossed it onto his vanity and Freddie caught sight of why the flippancy was there.

There was the beautiful bone-white shelf that Jim had built their little boy as a primary-schooler, for his rock collection and star books, it had been filled with his son’s childhood memorabilia the last time he saw it. But now it was full of trophies, medals and ribbons, almost fit to bursting.

“So… you must be quite good then, darling.” The frontman had whispered, feeling painfully awkward in a way that he never had around his own progeny before.

Mimì had shrugged, chewing on a stick of bubblegum and pulling a couple rings onto his hands, as if there was something he didn’t want his father to see. “Not according to my coach, I need to lose ten pounds by next competition. No one wants to watch a _fat gymnast.”_

Freddie hadn’t thought much of it then, he hadn’t dieted like that at Mimì’s age, but he was already skinny as a reed and his son… _wasn’t._ It would be fine, it would be good for his little boy to be healthy.

“It’s good to have goals, sweetling. I’m sure you’ll do it. I’ll even talk to Joe about cooking some healthier meals, we could all do for an upgrade.” Another kiss on his son’s temple and he was off. Content that he now had a way to help his boy.

Freddie never asked when the competition was. _A week away._

Or realized that his son rarely ate with them anymore.

Or that he’d already been dieting for three days prior, a gymnast special that he’d learned from old-fashioned coaches, older girls and boys. _Fast on nothing but water for three or four days, and you’ll always make weight._

“Okay, thanks Freddie.”

  
_“I'm so in love, so in love_  
_So in love, so in love…”_

“Uncle Brimi?” Mimì, this older Mimì who looked like a grown man with his own life and his own dreams, and a thick unspeakable concern dawning in his eyes, in the same way it used to when he was a child. “Are you okay?”

_No, because you didn’t come back._

_No, because I’ve missed you terribly._

_No, because I understand now, so intimately, how much I hurt you._

_No, because I don’t care if you work in a museum as a tour guide for all of your days._

_No… because I’ve lost track of you again_.

But before any of those pleas could leave Brian’s lips, another person entered the the lecture hall from an unseen side-door.

He was small, slight with pixie features and tiny chin, and dark hair with curls tighter than his own. The bloke cleared his throat with a small puff of air, looking at Mimì pointedly as his hands rested on the packaged fossil specimen boxes. “Dr. Hutton, did you want me to take these back upstairs?” His eyes screamed: _Do you need me to get you out of this?_

_Wait… Doctor?_

“Sure, darling. Tell Luna that I want to see both of you in the gift shop soon. Before my next lecture if you can, there’s something I’ve been dying to give her.”

Brian sputtered. “Did he just call you _‘doctor’?”_

The old man remembered that eager little boy who had flung his arms around Brian’s middle in his ceremonial robes, that infamous day when he’d finally earned his PhD, so many years after he'd started it. _I’m so proud of you, Uncle Brimi May!_

The guitarist had twirled his baby boy around and around until his squeals of delight were drowned out by the whooshing in his ears.

_(You missed it)._

“Yes?” The young man was visibly confused, still holding onto Brian’s elbows to steady him. “Because _I am?”_

It was the straw to break the camel’s back.

Brian didn’t know what to say anymore.

  
_“You look so beautiful in this light_  
_Your silhouette over me_  
_The way it brings out the blue in your eyes_  
_Is the Tenerife sea.”_

 


	8. libertine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A rousing thanks to all of you for sticking with me, the kudos and if you've left a review, don't worry, I'm going to answer every single one!! Hopefully, when I get home from work (I'm updating on the bus ;)). 
> 
> Sorry for the lack of plot in this (present day Freddie and Roger next chap ;)).
> 
>  
> 
> (Also, there you go, Z. Hope you feel better, bb <3))

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Features one of my favorite monologues! :) The Libertine 2005's Johnny Depp has given the best rendition thus far. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfTPS-TFQ_c
> 
> http://www.whysanity.net/monos/libertine.html
> 
> Definition is from Google and Webster. ;)

**Libertine** _: lib·er·tine_

_noun_

_1\. a person, especially a man, who behaves without moral principles or a sense of responsibility, especially in sexual matters._

_2\. a person who rejects accepted opinions in matters of religion; a freethinker._

 

  
A woozy Mimì jogged up the stairs to Max’s apartment, taking them two at a time, the ghost of a solitary red velvet birthday cupcake burning on his lips, no matter how much he scrubbed at his gory mouth.

The younger man had insisted on him coming over, despite the young professor’s poor performance in class that day and the exhaustion that oozed from every pore. Mimì Xerxes Hutton was in no state to be good company to anyone, especially not to his former student, turned dig-teammate and _beloved_ friend. But he went anyway, almost duty bound to do so. Even though his birthday had always been a sore topic and event, in every respect.

The stroppy fool didn’t even get a chance to knock on the painted sky blue door, before a six-year-old cloud of kinky dark hair peeked around the edge of the painted frame. With an enormous smile, round chin and a set of dark blue _Paw Patrol_ pajamas, being all that he could see. Mimì felt his hand seized by the two smaller ones that shot out to drag him inside the warmly lit apartment. He bent and used his free hand to push some lovely hair out of Luna’s face to expose her brilliant dark eyes, crinkling at the edges.  
  
“Hello, Lulu.” He bent to press a kiss to the crown of her head and she laughed, the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard.

“Happy Birthday, Mimmy Kitty!” She squealed, just as excitedly, wrapping her chubby arms around his thighs.

_Hello Kitty had a twin sister named Mimmy Kitty, as he was so helpfully informed on his first night._

In order to go inside, where he was commanded to go, he had to waddle side-to-side like a penguin. Complete with a little girl attached to his bottom half, almost like a barnacle stuck to the side of a ship. He couldn’t even pull his legs apart in the slightest, or stop himself from laughing for that matter. Not until Mr. Max charged over in a tizzy, dressed in nothing, but a pair of beige khaki shorts and one of those colorful binders that Mimì had bought for him all those months ago, it felt like a lifetime away.

“Luna, I have very important job for you.” Max bent down to stage-whisper into the little girl’s dark seashell ear. “Can you poke twenty-five rainbow birthday candles into the ice-cream for your Mimmy?”

The moment she had her mission, little Lulu took off with the pop of a bottle-rocket straight for the marble kitchen. Leaving both young men to wrap themselves around each other in a feverish embrace.

An eager Max pulled him into a bruising kiss, with a thick hot tongue filling his mouth, and forcing a moan past Mimì’s glossy lips. In the same breath, they held onto each other hard enough to turn their flesh black and blue. But just as they were starting to get excited by the heat and rolls of thunder sounding outside, Luna’s voice sounded from only a few steps behind them, like the chipper little cock-block she was.

“I did it! I did it! Come see!”

They sprang apart, just as an enormous crack of thunder rolled and lightning flashed across the windows. Luna squeaked with fear and all but launched herself into the closest parent’s arms, Mimì’s as it turned out. He started to rub her back with a practiced hand, “It’s okay, baby girl. I’ve got you.” Gently swaying her side to side.

For a moment, he wondered if the power had gone out as well, but it was just her puff of dark hair obscuring his vision. He pulled a few pieces out of his mouth and tickled her tummy to get her attention. “Lulu, I was promised ice-cream… can you show me where to blow out my candles?”

A soft nod into his chest as she pointed towards the kitchen.

He set her down softly, “Can you _show_ me?”

She obediently took him by the hand and did just that, dragging him off, as Max shot him a look that screamed: _‘You know where you’ll be getting your real birthday present tonight.’_ As he blew out what felt like a whole factory’s worth of birthday candles, that a clumsy child’s hand had stuck into a tub of neapolitan ice-cream.

He giggled as he swallowed a spoonful.

Then when he was in Max’s bed, legs wrapped around those delicious hips, eyes fluttering closed, lost in bliss.

He was only shaken from his reverie by his free left hand closing around a pair of pink satin panties hidden beneath the dirty sheets. They smelled like fruity feminine perfume, even more so when his hand brushed his own nose once again.

Max didn’t use that shit, or wear _pink drawers_ for that matter.

Mimì swallowed a mouthful of words that he could have said, as he gently pushed them off the bed. Suddenly happy for the power that had gone out just moments before. That way the younger man couldn’t see the way his lover’s dark eyes closed, full of undeserving tears. Mimì didn’t begrudge Max, he wasn’t being unfaithful. They weren’t even together.

They were just _friends_ , nothing more.

Max didn’t want a boyfriend, never had _(not after what happened with Luna’s other father),_ he merely wanted a friend.

A friend to eat ice-cream with he and his daughter, to go on paleontological digs with him and to work together in the field they loved.

And to sometimes fuck into the mattress while Lulu was asleep, a passionate release for them both, when they ached for the comfortable feeling of intimacy once more.

Max promised Mimì nothing exclusive and was very plain about not wanting that.

He didn’t want a relationship any more than good friends and the occasional fucking session.

That was the relationship _Mimì agreed to._

So the older man’s growing feelings were no one’s fault but his own.

  
He was just fated to fall in love with the men he could never have.

  
***

_“Allow me to be frank at the commencement. You will not like me.”_

***

  
He and Rufus argued about it a lot.

“Why are you being his easy fuck?”

Rufus’ blue eyes were so heavy, disappointed in him. _(Replace that oceanic blue with a gentle brown and it could’ve been his Da’s gaze during the majority of his childhood)._

“He doesn’t love you like that and he doesn’t _have to_.” Love wasn’t something that could be forced on someone, it was natural. A fated thing. “He won’t _ever_ love you like that, not in the same way you love him.” Rufus’ pleas fell on both deaf and inherently selfish pierced ears. Then in one last bid to get through to him: _“Max is never going to be your boyfriend, Mimì!”_

_He doesn’t want that._

_You have to respect what he wants too!_

_Everything in the world isn’t about you_.

“Don’t we all know it?!” A ragged breath escaped his lips, wheezy and tasting of pennies. Rusty kitchen knives piercing his lungs, over, over and over again, until he coughed red and bled out through the holes. “So I’m better off alone then?” The professor was ashamed at the way his voice cracked and ached, as if he were gargling with shrapnel, but he didn’t dare show it. His pride didn’t allow him the luxury.

“No, Blanket,” Rufus’ voice was obviously exasperated, but he pressed on firmly. “Just find a _healthy and consensual_ relationship! One that’s going to be _mutually beneficial!”_

_Mimì, please…_

“Ooo, big words! Is that supposed to impress me, darling?” It was Mimì’s number one defense mechanism, even after all the years between them, to turn sarcastic and barbed like a goddamn porcupine. Complete with his arms crossed and prominent teeth bared, as if parodying a cornered animal.

It was like trying to fight against a brick wall instead of a proper person. _You couldn’t quite argue with a brick to the face_.

“You’re acting like a child!” Of course the younger boy didn’t care much about that, when had he ever? “Other people don’t have to bend to your beck and call, _you spoiled little rich boy!”_ Aggravation oozed out from Rufus’ voice and each word was well-deserved, but it was clear that he still wished to take them back the moment he’d said them. Truthful or not. Neither of them were saints, but then again… _who actually was?_

A shocked silence abounded between them, as Mimì shoved the heels of his palms into his eyes to halt the burning preamble to any treacherous tears. Because he liked to pretend that he didn’t have feelings, that he wasn’t _really_ human. That made things all the more easy, you know. Having a heart was such a drag.

The gentle touch of his best-friend’s hand that wrapped around his bicep was emotionally painful, metaphorical claws pushing through the skin. Yet another stab of unrequited love.

“Mimì, I’m sorry… I…”

Empty words that were soon cut off by the younger man’s taut nod and steadying breath.

But Rufus went on, probably because he thought he had to. “Does he know?” Damn Roo and that little inclination towards protectiveness that had outlived their childhood.

Cue the shake of Mimì’s pretty dyed head, only further complemented by the tears in his eyes when he finally raised his blotchy face. “That I’m love with him? Not likely. It’ll hurt him and it’s not his fault. He doesn’t deserve that.” He didn’t do anything wrong.

“And you do?”

_Yeah. I do._

_I’m the one who’s unloveable._

_I’m the one who fell in love with my former-student and coworker, who turned an act of kindness into a friendship and then took it too far._

_I’m the one who always wants more._

_And I hate myself for it_.

“Look Roo, can’t we just talk about something else?”

  
***

_“The gentlemen will be envious and the ladies will be repelled._

_You will not like me now and you will like me a good deal less as we go on._

_Ladies, an announcement: I am up for it, all the time. That is not a boast or an opinion, it is bone hard medical fact. I put it round you know. And you will watch me putting it round and sigh for it. Don’t. It is a deal of trouble for you and you are better off watching and drawing your conclusions from a distance than you would be if I got my tarse up your petticoats._ ”

***

  
“He looks like you, Fred.”

Deaky was sniffling, trying to disguise the remnants of past tears on his cheeks, as he peered down at the newborn child in Freddie’s arms. He was finally asleep after the screaming match that had lasted nearly an hour. The tiny blond was suckling on his chubby fist, as if inches away from pounding someone in the face or starting a war of the ages. The bassist could practically see the way their frontman’s great heart melted for the sleeping infant in his keeping. That incredible voice that Deaky had grown up with, was crooning soft nothings to soothe the tiny creature in his arms and swaying side to side to help.

“Screams like you too.” Roger grunted, his only contribution as he went back to glaring at nothing. Clearly the hospital’s terrible pinkish-white walls had offended his delicate sensibilities.

“Don’t be so sullen, Roggie dear.” Freddie cooed, resting his tired head on the blond’s shoulder, batting his dark eyes up at him, like he used to when they were skinny little things without a pound to their names. “I think he looks remarkably like you.”

Brian reached out a long spindly finger to caress the downy golden hair that grew from the child’s scalp. “It’s just the blond that does it.”

The baby let out a little displeased mewl at the bothersome touching and Bri instantly snatched his hand away, as if he’d been burned. Freddie laughed quietly, more bounce than volume, as he tried not to disturb the baby anymore than they already had.

“Pouty little thing, aren’t you?” He tsked at the bundle in his arms. “It’s only your Uncle Brimi, dear heart.” The tiny living doll fluttered its eyelashes and opened its round pink mouth in a toothless yawn. “You’d better get used to him, _Khashayar.”_ _He’ll be looking after you soon_. Freddie didn’t need to say it, they all knew.

“Khashayar?” It came out a bit garbled and Roger’s nose wrinkled at how obvious that was. “That’s what you’re naming him?”

“I would,” Freddie hummed, as he rubbed that soft round cheek covered in translucent white peach-fuzz and cooed. “Khashayar was a Persian king, one of the best… and I promised my mother that he would have at least one Parsi name out of the lot.”

“It’s nice, Fred.”

“Nice and _ostracizing.”_ That honeyed voice turned tight and pained as he pursed his lips. “Perhaps I should use the older form instead, _Xerxes_. That sounds a bit more like rockstar-eccentric and less…” The older man lost the words and sighed heavily. “Well, I’m only trying to make this as easy as possible for him, dears.” Defensive when he had no right to be, he was just with the boys after all. They already knew every secret, every misstep and mistake.

“Easy?” John’s eyebrows furrowed so deeply that they met in the middle.

Freddie sighed and moved to pass the baby into John’s vaguely trembling arms. The bassist started to pull away at first, in blatant apprehension, but his oldest friend was certainly not taking no for an answer. Freddie didn’t rest until his darling Deaky held his heavy heart in those string-stripped hands. The older man watching with rapt attention as their John, cowed by the weight of the responsibility in his keeping, moved about until he was comfortable, the ease of four prior children in his incremental movements.

“Yes _easy_ , my love.”

John mentally conjured up a little boy with flyaway blond hair and a familiar smile.

A familiar smile, that he was certain would break his heart every single day.

“It’s bad enough that he’s got a touch of my coloring.” A golden tint to his baby soft skin that would darken in the summer sun and lighten in the winter. “I wouldn’t want him to feel out of place in a family of _Roberts and Louisas_ as well.”

Painful words that he could never say, played on John’s lips. _Ronnie’s pregnant, Fred._

 _I’m not ready to raise six children_.

Brian couldn’t manage to force his own words past his bloodless lips either. _My marriage is in shambles, Fred._

_How am I suppose to bring another child into that?_

Roger was the only one of them who would dare to speak his own pain, looking into Freddie’s face, pockmarked in blue-black lesions covered by layers upon layers of caked-on makeup. Their friend was painfully thin and his lips were cracked. The new father before them looked like he was edging closer to the grave, than to the man he used to be before all of this.

“Rufus just got out of hospital, Fred. I can’t—“ The blond swallowed a mouthful of phlegm and tears. “ _Fuck this…_ ” Desperately running his trembling hands through his receding hairline, biting down hard on his bottom lip when it pushed out. _“Fuck this!”_ He sobbed roughly, and the tortuous sound broke all the hearts in the nearby vicinity. Brian even reached for his oldest friend with a soft little knowing: _‘Rog…’_ , but for all the love in the world, his hand was violently shrugged off.

_Damned if he did._

_Damned if he didn’t_.

Roger was wheezing and it wasn’t from decades of fags and booze. “I can’t… I can’t look at _that baby_ everyday and remember… _I can’t!”_ He pressed a closed fist against his mouth so hard that he thought it was going to bruise there.

 _That baby_ , not _Freddie’s son._

Just _that baby._

And, when years upon years later, Freddie slumped onto the couch in the studio that they’d bought long ago, his salt-and-pepper head in his hands as he cried. “He hasn’t rung in months, you know. I’ve called a dozen times, Jim’s called even more and he just never picks up…” Whispered like it was his greatest shame. “H-He’s never going to come home again, is he?” The singer looked up at them with tears rolling down his craggy cheeks, hands emptier than they’d been in years, sniffling as his chest bobbed up and down outside of his control with its stifled sobs.

_You left us once too, Fred._

Roger didn’t say.

_So I suppose it’s only fair… like father, like son._

  
***

_“Gentlemen. Do not despair, I am up for that as well. And the same warning applies. Still your cheesy erections till I have had my say. But later when you shag - and later you will shag, I shall expect it of you and I will know if you have let me down.”_

***

  
Jim used to dream of a wedding day when Mimì was small.

Imagining his precious little boy as a young man with loose golden curls brushing his ears, and a crown of white and red flowers upon them. His soft frame trussed up in a hurricane of red taffeta above and heavy black boots below. Of course his little boy would get married looking like Lydia from _Beetlejuice,_ Jim expected nothing less from their son.

His little avenging angel who would bring him handfuls of seeds from the nearby pence-shop to plant in their garden. Cheap and half-dead things bought with his pocket money that rarely grew. But Jim treasured every little moment that he shared with his boy, covering up those tiny sun-kissed hands with his own large and life-worn mitts.

Childhood innocence was so fleeting and yet Jim’s own son seemed to have less of it than he should’ve.

He couldn’t remember when the fights started, Mimì had always been a more difficult child, as stubborn as the day was long and loud-mouthed enough to give back as good as he got. But the older he became, the less he seemed to care and the more it hurt everyone involved, who all seemed to decide at once (without consulting Jim) that Mimì wasn't worth the effort.

Jim could physically feel their boy pulling away from them and he was helpless to stop it.

Gone was the tolling of wedding bells in his dreams or ideas for dress patterns, there were no handfuls of half-dead seeds or little arms reaching up to squeeze him from behind in a surprise hug.

Instead, there were only prayers that his son would be safe despite all the odds against him, and stumble through the door every night.

Part of parenthood was being utterly scared shitless of the world outside your doors, the world that you couldn’t protect your children from.

_Bicycle accidents that cost your child his spleen… getting his heart broken endlessly… bouts of pneumonia and strep B that would haunt Jim for the rest of his life…_

A father could never really forget the feeling of his son’s labored puffs of breath into his neck, an astronomically high fever blazing on top of it all and the way it felt when those breaths stopped entirely.

For some reason Jim still remembered what shoes his son was wearing the last time it happened. Mimì at fifteen years old with puppy fat still clinging to his jawline and rounding out his tummy. Phoebe had shoved the first available pair of shoes onto his teenager’s bare and icy-cold feet… a pair of glittery pink Toms bobbing in midair as their baby’s scabby knees rested over the crook of Jim’s arm. Those shoes glittered the same way in his arms as they did on the gurney where he laid his son. So that the doctors and nurses could whisk him off to shove a chest tube through his heaving ribcage and drain the fluid that always collected there so fucking fast.

Jim was the one holding Freddie to keep him upright, as Phoebe did the same for Joe.

No matter what happened between their little family, Mimì would always be their baby.

Even as he railed against Freddie for forcing a helmet into his hands.

All of them were terrified of the motorcycle that their son had built with his own two hands. Putting on the mirrors by banging them with the flat-end of a screwdriver and tightly screwing a bash-plate over the engine. He didn’t exactly have the best track record with bikes. But of course the helmet, the safest one they could find, wasn’t up to snuff. Of course it was just an insult.

_(Probably because of the way Freddie approached it, with a tone of superiority and the forced mentality of: Father Knows Best)._

“I’m not wearing it!”

“You’d better button up those lips, love. _Yes, you are.”_

Jim ached to reach out and pull his angry wayward son into his arms again without being rebuked. To rub that overdose of eyeliner from those lovely eyes and scrub the smell of puke and booze off his too-tight clothes.

_We love you, we’re just trying to keep you safe._

“Fuck you, Freddie! The only time you even _talk_ to me is to point out yet another _flaw!”_ The teenager’s voice cracked spectacularly and Jim saw his husband recoil at the sound of his own name emerging from their child’s lips. “When you’re home that is.”

Ouch. That was a sore point for all of them, Jim himself included.

Freddie’s tour schedule and the way it had only slowed with age and never properly stopped, not since the early 90’s, was a point of contention in their little family and always had been. Freddie missed out on so much of Mimì’s early life. But at least he had an excuse. Jim just woke up every morning and saw less and less of the little boy who had once filled his every waking hour with purpose and love. No matter how close he was to the boy physically, _emotionally_ … they were worlds away.

_‘I love you, Da!’_

But they weren’t always.

He used to rise to his son’s smiling golden face instead of the sun that shone above, and set to the same.

“ _Mimì Xerxes Hutton,_ you can’t talk to your father like that! _Apologize, right now!”_ Jim spoke on reflex, recycling some of the stern phrases and shouting that his own parents had once used on him. Not that they’d worked all that well back then either.

The tearful doe eyes that turned on him were full of hurt, sadness and acceptance, as if he’d already known what Jim would say. “Of course you take his side.” An eye-roll and stifled sob against the back of his hand. “I’m out of here!”

He charged out in a tizzy and flung the door open with enough force to leave a dent in the wall.

And he didn’t even take the helmet.

Jim used to dream of an eclectic red and gold wedding day when Mimì was small.

But by the time his son was grown, all those had long-disappeared in wisps of smoke. He knew that he likely wouldn’t be invited anyway.

  
***

_“I wish you to shag with my homuncular image rattling in your gonads. Feel how it was for me, how it is for me and ponder. 'Was that shudder the same shudder he sensed? Did he know something more profound? Or is there some wall of wretchedness that we all batter with our heads at that shining, livelong moment?’”_

***

  
“You didn’t know?” Mimì stepped back from the uncomfortable and unexpected embrace of the uncle who was supposed to be on the other side of the city, yet who was emotionally on fucking Jupiter. The twenty-five-year-old with his multi-ringed hands that settled on his own rounded hips for a change, letting a hysterical laugh slip past his chapped lips as he shook his perky dyed head. “You’re unbelievable! Both of you! You lot just **_didn’t give a shit!”_**

_You didn’t ask about me, you didn’t look for me… I sent your invitation to Freddie to make sure you got it, you prick._

_You still just don’t care._

_…Why am I surprised?_

“Mimì…” So much feeling packed into that one little name. Brian looked so old all of a sudden, older than Mimì had ever been able to see him. A sad old man.

“No, no…” He forced a smile to his sore lips, porcelain and saccharine sweet as he sat on the edge of the desk behind him, vividly tattooed arms folded across his chest. “Please Dr. May, do regale me with your actual agenda. Why exactly are you here today? What would you like to see?” He defaulted to his worst setting, being a porcupine and horrible little shit once more, his only defense mechanism against the world.

“We have a wonderful exhibition upstairs on crocodylomorphs and early archosaurs…” His smile never leaving his face, the brittle nature of the words were the only indications of his true feelings.

John stepped forwards for once, _(Uncle Doormat)_ with his own hand outstretched. Maybe to caress his nephew’s cheek? To clasp their hands together? Either way the youth didn’t give him a chance.“Mimì, _I_ didn’t… _we_ didn’t…”

The young man ignored them entirely, babbling on about what he knew best, hoping that they would just fucking leave. Or maybe they didn’t have the proper balls for it, like he did? The balls to walk away from everything that he’d ever known as a dumb kid. “Oh! Maybe you’re here for our vast palaeoanthropology collection? Not exactly my area, as I’m a vertebrate paleontologist, but I do know that we have a few pieces from Piltdown Man, one of the best palaeoanthropology hoaxes in history. Which isn’t even to count—”

_“Mimì, I’m sorry!”_

Brian was breathing hard, as if he’d just run a mile or gone for an hour on his stationary bike, fists clenched by his sides and eyes full of shame. It was the only way to describe them.

Mimì’s smile cracked down the middle and tears burned in his eyes no matter how hard he tried to blink them away.

“For what?!” The raspy whisper snuck out between his gritted teeth, lips quivering until he bit down to silence them. His hitched breaths made him sound like toddler on the brink of a tantrum.

Neither man said anything and the young doctor swallowed back another hysterical laugh as he met Brian’s heavy eyes head-on. “For loving me _conditionally?”_ Mimì sighed and shook his head. “No Brian, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I couldn’t live up to your expectations.”

Red bloomed across his Uncle Brimi’s pale face, as though he’d just been slapped. Brian felt things, he felt things at a magnitude that most people did not. When things were bad, they were awful and when things were good, they were magnificent. When rage exploded in those great big and gentle eyes that Mimì had grown up with, he was instantly afraid of what it meant. The snowy haired man’s lips formed the words in anger and shock, like he couldn’t believe he’d just heard them. _‘My expectations?’_

John was next. Standing behind Brian like a lost child, always needing one of his bandmates to guide him when things got hard. _Weak_ , Mimì nearly spat at his feet. “And _you?_ I’m sorry that I’m not Freddie or Roger, that I’m just a terrible amalgamation of their worst traits to you, _John_. I’m sorry that I’m not _more._ ” Tears on his water-line and cheeks puffed out.

_More of a real person to you._

He swept his canvas bag off the desk in one fell swoop, securing it over his shoulder with all the fanfare in the world. Resisting the urge to flip all of them off as he marched away and up the steps to leave the lecture hall.

Only halted by the hand that closed around the strap of his bag, and viciously jerked him back like a seatbelt.

“Blanket, _wait!”_

The paleontologist nearly fell on his ass as he whipped around and grit his teeth, like a predator baring its canines. His face coming to rest mere inches away from Rufus’, staring eye-to-eye with the added benefit of Mimì standing a few steps above him. Those blue eyes seeped guilt from around the corners and the younger man took a thrill of cold satisfaction, in the way he physically had to peel Roo’s fingers off the strap of his messenger bag, one by one.

“Nope.” He popped the ‘p’ and strode off. “Not worth my time.”

Skipping every other step as he raced up them and out the door, leaving his two uncles near the blackboard still, all red-faced and blotchy in their shock. Rufus was glaring up at him with arms crossed in that disappointed way of his.

“If you do need to talk to me about the pity tour, give me a ring.” Mimì spat behind him. “Who knows, I might even answer.”

  
***

_“That is it. That is my prologue, nothing in rhyme, no protestations of modesty, you were not expecting that I hope. I am John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester and I do not want you to like me.”_

***

 

 


	9. When he loved me...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Happy birthday to a most wonderful human being called Kris!!!!! @makesteverogersproud on tumblr and here as well. She is my beta and my lovely human friend!!!! She is one of the kindest and sweetest people that I have ever had the pleasure of knowing!!!! <333333 For her birthday, she asked for fluff. Unfortunately I am an angst-writer through and through. SO! She gets two different chapters in two different fics, in the hope that the happy from each chapter can make one happy chapter combined :) A million thanks to her! (And if you’re wondering why these chapters suck it’s because I couldn’t have her beta her birthday chaps guys, it woulda been so rude!) Anyway, here we go! 
> 
> Kris, thank you so much for everything and for being my friend above all else. <333 
> 
> Everyone else, ENJOY!!! :DDD

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Features: When He Loved Me by Samantha Barks (her version anyway). And a brief parody of We Will Rock You by Queen.
> 
> (Also if you've left me a comment, I promise to answer later today when I get off work, I just wanted her chaps to get out first.)

_“When somebody loved me, everything was beautiful_  
_Every hour we spent together lives within my heart_  
_And when he was sad, I was there to dry his tears_  
_And when he was happy, so was I_

 _When he loved me…_ ”

 

  
The fat blond baby in Jim’s lap was trying valiantly to stick his entire chubby fist into his mouth, budding teeth be damned, as his fathers spoke to Dr. Atkinson, Freddie’s longstanding GP.

“As you know, we ran several tests on your son’s blood over a period of several months to discern if he’d managed to contract a fetal variant of the virus and—.”

Freddie, even weak and frail as he was, _(practically drowning in his light blue suit, and with his wooden cane turned almost indistinguishable from his birdlike legs)_ , could command attention like no other. He cut off the GP’s nervous rambling with a pointed look and sharp exhale of breath. “Gordon, dear.” Silencing the older man with a wave of his spotted hand. “Enough with all this science shit, I don’t have the foggiest idea about any of it.”

Baby Mimì made it his new goal to gum the hell out of a plastic flower’s waxy leaf, the potted thing sitting demurely on Dr. Atkinson’s desk.

“Is he going to be alright? Does he have _It?”_

Dr. Atkinson’s gentle blue eyes turned to regale little Mimì and shook his head, digging a notepad out of his desk drawer to scribble out a little rough sketch of HIV’s viral structure, along with the structures of a plague bacterium and a smallpox virus. “He’s going to be just fine, Freddie. And no, he can’t… ever.”

Freddie was stunned into silence, eyes wide, so it was Jim who picked up the slack, shifting his child in his arms to scoot forward in his seat, accent thick on his tongue. “I don’t understand, he can’t get sick?”

Dr. Atkinson merely pushed the notepad towards them, using the end of his pen to gesture towards the rough sketches on the page. “This is the virus that causes smallpox, the bacterium that causes the Black Plague and HIV.” Tapping each of them in turn. “Each of them has an envelope around them, an encapsulated cell wall. For these pathogens to enter, infect and in some cases _hijack_ a body’s cells, they need to bind to a specific receptor on the outside of healthy cells. That receptor is called CD4. It’s the key to opening the door into the cell. But the actual door into the cell is through its co-receptors, the most common being CCR5.” Both Jim and Freddie were barely following along, but they nodded nevertheless.

“In the Middle Ages, the Black Death and smallpox took many many lives, but there were always survivors and those survivors would often live to have children of their own and so on. Many of those survivors had a genetic mutation called _CCR5-delta 32_ , which meant that they produced no CCR5 co-receptors or produced shoddy ones. Ergo, they were resistant to diseases that targeted the CCR5 co-receptors.”

The doctor scribbled out the CCR5 from his little diagrams.

“Numerous outbreaks over the centuries helped to keep the mutation in circulation.”

Freddie, who was always brighter than he gave himself credit for, picked it up first. His voice fading down to a fragile whisper as tears started to choke him. “So he’s immune to HIV? He’s not going to get sick?” His voice sounded oddly reminiscent of a child asking their parent if they were _absolutely sure_ that there were no monsters hiding in the wardrobe. Ready to wholeheartedly accept the answer they gave.

“Yes.”

Their bouncing baby miracle was emphatically sucking on his thumb, like it was a rubber dummy.

“And there’s something else too…”

  
_“Through the summer and the fall, we had each other, that was all_  
_Just he and I together, like it was meant to be…”_

  
“I love you, Baba.”

Mumbled around a toothy little yawn as a little towhead tucked under Freddie’s chin. His four-year-old boy was cuddled up in his sweaty arms. His _defiant_ little son who pointedly loathed cuddling more and more the older he got. And yet for some reason, during their brief break for Brian’s age-long guitar solo that night, his little dragon had deemed Freddie a worthy perch.

The frontman kissed that adorable little button-nose, relishing in the cute way it twitched against his lips. A precious gift from God. _(Which, coincidentally, was also Bri’s nickname for Mimì, Freddie’s GFG: Gift From God)._

When he was about to go back on, begrudgingly as it was, his little boy obediently slid off his chest, only keeping ahold of Freddie's hand for a few minutes more.

“I love you, Baba.”

Freddie was touching up his makeup in the mirror, but paused at the sound of that, to bend down and press another kiss to his son’s messy towhead. “I love you too, little dove.”

The sunshiny smile that exploded across Mimì’s face could have lit up all of central London. Almost as bright as it was a few nights prior, when he’d dressed up for a New York City Halloween party. Coming out of his bedroom in a pair of tight red pants with a red tie loosely looped around his neck, blond hair in customary disarray, as Jim chuckled behind a well-placed hand.

“Look at me, Baba, _I’m you!”_

Spinning around and around in circles, like the world was his stage, helped along by an obliging Phoebe who was twirling him with a single finger, till he giggled and shrieked with glee. A miniature Persian Popinjay. His delighted and uniquely happy child.

Those were the moments Freddie wanted to hold onto forever.

  
His little boy —who wasn’t so little anymore once he hit sixteen— racing through the kitchen in a pair of tiny workout shorts and a golden tank top that he’d stolen from Jim, it was obvious in the way it grazed his mid-thighs and billowed in the wind as he ran. _(Freddie too, had a habit of stealing those same shirts from his darling's closet)._

The teenager snatching the sandwich out of Joe’s hand in the flurry and stuffing half of it in his mouth in one go. Him laughing hysterically at the affronted look on their chef’s face, as their hurricane of a boy slid down the railing of the back steps, instead of using them as they were meant to. “Love you, gotta go, bye!”

He ran off so fast that Phoebe had to throw his knapsack out the window.

“Thanks, Pheebs!”

  
His son dressed up like Cinderella at little Lola Daisy May Taylor’s request.

That fluffy puffy powder-blue dress, the pink rouge on his cheeks and gloss on his mouth, blond hair piled on top his head and shimmery lined eyes. He held Lola’s hand, she was his acting fairy princess, with her pink tutu and white wand. _(And she’d finally found someone to play with her properly, so she was delighted)._ Roger rolled his eyes to hide his smile at the sight, whilst Brian whipped out his camera.

“Ready, Lolly?”

  
His grown son sitting next to him with a beer in hand, scowling at Freddie’s chest with all he had in him. “Fred, I can forgive you a lot of shit. But not _that._ ” Gesturing towards the salt and pepper hair that peeked above his father’s collar.

Identical dark eyes met each other and Freddie had to smother a laugh behind his hand, when he realized what his son was saying. Phoebe didn’t bother to do so and neither did Jim or Joe, which only made his boy look more affronted. “Hey, stop laughing! It’s not a joke! One day, little puberty-riddled me woke up to find a _persian rug_ on my chest! I’m _blond_ and you can still _see it!_ Because I have _so fucking much!”_

A chucking Jim rested a gentle hand on Mimì’s shoulder, trying to look comforting _(while trying to smother his own guffaws)_ , but all their pouting boy did was flop over and groan into the picnic table.

“Love, some men think that’s very attractive. How do you think your father got _me?”_

Cue the fake gagging noises that finally sent Freddie over the edge, cackling like a witch. _(He knew the truth of course, that his big expressive brown eyes had actually won his husband over. The same eyes that their son shared. Eyes that never lied, as all their feelings could be read in those warm brown depths)._

“I hate all of you!” With a half-hidden smile.

  
Freddie’s memories were in the stereo-photographs that Brian had taught him how to love.

His little boy throwing himself into leaf piles and dragging Freddie along with him, until they were both left sneezing and laughing, falling over one another in their efforts to get up.

Dancing around the kitchen in fuzzy socks, skidding around on the linoleum. Those tiny feet resting on top of his, so that they could dance together. _(His son’s giggles would live on in his heart forever)._

Making mocktinis out of lime sherbet and sprite, so they could ‘drink’ together at fancy parties.

Birthday cakes of every shape and form.

Those were always special in the Mercury-Hutton household and there had been some fantastic ones over the years: a full orchestra for Phoebe, a model of his Montreux apartment for Freddie, a garden for Jim and a perfect copy of their little Irish bungalow, and a ski-slope for Joe. But Mimì’s cakes were the most special, the little boy would always shriek and jump up and down whenever he saw his surprise confectionary. So Freddie remembered each and every one.

But his son's _first_ birthday cake a been a gift from the band and Miami.

A three-tier masterpiece with the top designed to look like a pillow, complete with the necessary ruffles and faux stitching, studded with edible pearls. Red velvet on the inside, which would become his son’s favorite flavor.

However, the best part was the little molding chocolate crown on the top, colored gold and stenciled with blue baby footprints, surrounded by a _Happy Birthday, Prince Mimì_ in fancy white cursive.

Freddie had cried.

He’d cried, until he started laughing hysterically and Roger had to tug him into his soft chest, cooing sweet nothings to calm him down from the emotional high. Roggie always was the best at bringing him back to himself once more.

It was just so _incredible_. Freddie had just never thought he’d see his son reach a year.

Let alone all of those that came after.

  
_“And when he was lonely, I was there to comfort him_  
_And I knew that he loved me_  
_So the years went by, I stayed the same…”_

  
Freddie was gone quite a bit. In fact, that was one of the core facets of Mimì’s childhood.

He was an internationally lauded rockstar, and he went to a lot of places that his husband and son couldn’t follow. There was nothing they could do about it, other than accepting it and learning to live with it.

Sometimes living with it, meant Mimì coming home from school as a little boy, to find his Da crying into the koi pond. His absolute loneliness permeating the air around them like a dour curtain of gloom. The primary-schooler would force himself into his Da’s warm plush lap and babble on and on about koi fish of all things. Letting the man he loved cry into his messy hair, instead of the water.

“Da, did you know that in Japan, koi fish are passed down as family heirlooms? They can live up to two-hundred years or more!”

Jim had sniffled, pressing a kiss to his temple.“No, I didn’t, baby. Do you want to have the fish when you’re bigger?”

“Really?” His big brown eyes, Freddie’ eyes, widened in absolute shock and wonder. “You mean it?”

As if there was nothing greater in the world to him, than a pond full of fish that his fathers loved.

Freddie would often come home to find his husband sleeping somewhere odd, with a little blond imp in his lap. They were Freddie’s precious boys, rough and tumble as they were. And often the wayward frontman too, would get tugged into the embrace by a little freckled hand that wanted both his daddies to hold him.

Joe and Phoebe would wake them up with tea and biscuits, or actual food if it was meal time. It seemed like those years would last forever.

But as they _didn’t_ , they went by, and it was Mimì who started to leave them all behind.

Because he’d found somewhere more important that he had to be.

Seeing his Uncle Bri brought down low by depression was nothing new. Sometimes he got dragged down somewhere that no one else could follow and sometimes he needed some help getting back up again. There was no shame in it. Brian just needed someone to be there. Someone who wasn’t afraid to help him fight the demons inside his head.

Uncle Bri was Mimì’s teacher, his mentor, his uncle and his friend. He was a shoulder to cry on and someone who shared Mimì’s passions. He also, sometimes _needed somebody_ in a way that words couldn’t express. Sometimes it hurt him to be alone.

So, he never was.

When things got dark, he had an annoying little sprite to turn on the light.

“I love you, Uncle Bri.”

It didn’t matter how old he was.

Brian would still have a pair of arms that held him close, and a round face that buried itself in hair that often hadn’t been washed in days. Mimì would pull away, but never go too far, switching on a documentary of the cosmos or talking about nothing for hours. Allowing Brian to hold onto him and bury his own craggy face in the dyed hair that always smelled of cherries. That dyed hair was often a toss-up between pink, or blue, or chartreuse, and rarely, it was that natural state of blond that reminded the older man of Roger and the early days of _Smile_.

“I’m tired.” Brian would say sometimes.

“Okay,” Mimì would say. “We’ll take a nap then, and when we wake up… maybe you won’t be so tired anymore.” Then they would take a nap on the sofa. And funnily enough, Mimì was always right.

“It’s too dark.” Brian would say sometimes.

“Okay,” Mimì would say. “I’ll turn on the light.”

“I just feel purposeless.” Brian would say sometimes.

“Okay,” Mimì would say. “Do you want to make something?”

Sometimes it was an arts and crafts project, or a model of the solar system or some sort of abstract piece of space memorabilia. Sometimes it was a song. And Brian was once again reminded of Freddie, as the boy sang effortlessly, he had a real gift. He had so many.

Once, it was cupcakes, only once. Red velvet with pink frosting that they made from scratch. Brian had thought they did a pretty excellent job, Anita even commended them on their work as she tried one. Red velvet was Mimì’s favorite, Brian still remembered ordering that first birthday cake for him as a one year old, never expecting that it would affect his palate for life. But despite the bright smile on his face and the dozen or so confectionary items of his favorite flavor. Mimì didn’t eat one. Not a single one.

_(In later years, when Brian **knew** without a shadow of a doubt, he could have kicked himself for being so naive. But the closer you are, the less you see)._

“Don’t you want one?”

“Nope. It’s okay, you keep ‘em, Uncle Bri. I can’t do my tricks at the gym, if I get any fatter.”

_Fatter._

There were a million things he could have said, that he should have said, but Brian let it go.

Let himself be distracted by that easy smile and laugh, as the boy bounded onto yet another topic. As if he himself hadn’t used that trick a thousand times before.

  
_“But he began to drift away, I was left alone_  
_Still I waited for the day, when he'd say: ‘I will always love you’_  
_Lonely and forgotten, never thought he'd look my way_  
_And he smiled at me and held me, just like he used to do_  
_Like he loved me, when he loved me…”_

  
Brian caught up with him far too soon.

Probably because Mimì had taken the showy exit instead of the proper one. _(Or maybe, because he wanted to be caught)._

He was stilled by a gentle hand on his arm.

_Mimì had always had an affinity for gymnastics. So at the tender age of five, he had already mastered a cartwheel, a backbend and a handstand through watching competitions on the telly. Then he'd made it his mission in life to teach Rufus the same things. Rufus who had always been a bit bandy-legged and more interested in playing with his drum-kit or watching butterflies, than flipping around like mad._

_So it went predictably sour when Mimì tried to teach him._

_“Just kick your feet up, Roo. I’ll catch you.”_

_His first attempt was pitiful at best, the older boy barely managing to kick his trainers an inch up from the garden._

_“Try again, Roo! They need to be higher up so I can catch them!”_

_His second attempt was a little better, despite Mimì’s whinging the whole time._

_“That’s a bit better, but one more time!”_

_The third attempt of course, ended with a pair of trainers clocking Mimì directly in the mouth. Knocking out his two front baby teeth and a fair bit of blood into the grass. The younger boy himself had been too in shock to cry, scooping up and staring at his own lost teeth, so instead it was Rufus who burst into juicy tears. And he all but dragged Mimì inside by his closed fist, still holding his own bloody teeth._

_The moment they stepped inside the kitchen, full of their parents and siblings, Mimì had flashed his gory mouth with a smile._

_“Rufus knocked out my teeth!” Of course it sounded like: Ofis doffed ow m’ teef! Shouted with all the delight in the world._

_Freddie nearly fainted and Brian instantly bent down to his nephew’s level in concern, big brown eyes searching the boy's face._

_He was stilled by a gentle hand on his arm._

The words rose up in his heart, in his chest like the tide, they just grew and grew, swelling until he couldn’t contain them anymore, spinning around and screaming as he shoved the hand off:

_**“What do you want from me?!”** _

He couldn’t recall in waking memory, the last time his voice had been so loud, so _raw._

His throat felt like it was bleeding as he instantly gasped for breath. Fireworks and pop-rockets were suddenly exploding in his chest and burning up all the oxygen in his lungs, black spots danced in front of his eyes.

Brian stepped back as if he’d been slapped clean across the face, like he still expected the boy who turned around to be that same dumb kid who’d gotten his teeth knocked out in the garden. That little boy was _gone_. And he was never coming back. He had no place anymore. He was a relic.

So many people in his life had compared him to a fire, to a hurricane, and now he felt like a raging inferno was bubbling under his skin. A flame growing out of control, a hurricane destroying towns and cities and stealing the breath from the lungs of innocents. He was insurmountable. He was immense. He was monstrous. _(He couldn’t draw a single uninhibited breath)._

 _“Why are you looking at me like that?”_ He hissed through his gritted teeth. “Like you still expect me to be that same _stupid boy_ who got his teeth knocked out in the garden! That same _worthless little twat_ who flipped over the handlebars of his bicycle and maimed himself for life!” He stepped closer and closer to Brian, with half a mind to fist his hand in the material of his shirt and drag him close enough to punch. Mimì was hyperventilating and spitting all over the place, talking so fast that his words climbed on top of one another and rendered them intelligible. “That _fatass teenager_ who always sat with you when you were having a wobble, just because he couldn’t see _the sad and pathetic old man you really are!”_

He was crying himself now, his cheeks were bright red and his hands clenched into the fists that he wouldn’t throw. The world around him was exploding into a thousand different colors, like he’d just been afflicted with a sudden case of synesthesia.

 _“I didn’t want you here_ , and do you know _why?_ Because I don’t want _anything to do with you!_ Why won’t you just _leave me alone?!”_

He was coughing, panting and gasping between every exclamation, his breaking point was left somewhere in the fucking distance as his body burned. _(He just wanted out, why wouldn’t they let him leave?)_ He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to be anywhere else. He didn’t want to go on tour with the asshole brigade, he just wanted to go home and play with his fucking cats. He didn’t want the spark plugs inside his throat to ignite the entire world along with him. _(He couldn’t fucking breathe)._

“I made my own _life!”_

He did. He went to school, he bought a place, he made a career for himself. He was so fucking proud of his own goddamn accomplishments. He wanted to scream them from the rooftops.

_Look! I, Mimì Hutton made myself an existence that has nothing to do with Freddie Fucking Mercury or goddamn Queen!”_

It wasn’t until he paused to try and draw in a fucking breath, hands on his knees and tears dripping onto the floor… that he realized _where_ they were.

Cue a suffocating clench of his lungs and still-beating heart, as he saw that they were standing in front of the glass walls of the gift-shop, golden-hued and inviting. People were staring at them in varied levels of shock and curiosity, crowding them in, gawking at the show. It felt like being in the center of a fucking parade. It felt like being in secondary school all over again, except there were no voices screaming at him. _Freddie’s Faggy Boy, Freddie’s Fairy Boy, Poofter Prince, News Of The Whale, Big Disgrace…_

 _Stomp, stomp, clap…_  
_We will, we will, punch you…_  
_We will, we will, smack you…_  
_We will, we will, kill you…_

_Laughing as they shoved him down the steps._

He didn't give a shit that Brian was crying, reaching out to him, or that his uncle looked genuinely _scared_.

He didn’t give a shit.

He _didn’t_.

_(He did)._

He’d made Brian _cry_.

_(He couldn’t breathe)._

Mimì’s eyes were drawn, as he tried to calm himself down, to the two figures standing a little in front of the crowds. One was a stocky man with a hat pulled down low over his ears and sunnies to cover up his blue eyes. But Mimì would have known that thrice-damned Santa Claus beard anywhere. _(The sunnies too. He was sure that he’d stolen that same pair and paraded around the garden with them once, giggling at the look on his Uncle Rog's face)._ The same could have been said for the man who walked next to him, with patchy salt and pepper stubble to match what was on his head. Well, all but the temples. He wore a fedora over his head to cover it and hide his identity, but it was no use, Mimì _knew._

He walked over in time to the way his heart beat frenetically inside his chest, _(screaming for air, he needed air, everything was spinning spinning spinning…)._

To stare up at the man and slowly pull the hat down from his head, with tears stinging in his eyes. _(In that moment, he was a toddler again. Pulling back the blanket to expose his father’s smiling face and laughing hysterically, like it was the best magic trick of all)._ The eyes they had always shared, expressive brown hues meeting across the chasm of time and space.

“Look everyone!” He shouted with a broken heart, to their audience of a hundred or more, smartphones ablaze. He wondered what the rags would say. What the Twitter caption would be. His lips trembled as he tried to hold them in a smile, cheeks glistening. “It’s _Freddie Mercury!_ I bet he’ll give you all _fucking autographs_ , if you ask nicely…”

That was all it took.

Once the scene was set, Mimì all but ran full-tilt into the gift-shop, gasping and coughing into his hands, knowing full-well that there was a get-away door in the storage room. One that led to the upper-level offices.

_Fuck it all, he was getting out._

And he didn’t give a single shit about the old men getting mobbed by fans, even poor John who hated people smothering him or even approaching him in public.

Or the way Rufus yelled over the cacophony.

“They were supposed to be in the gift-shop.” _Mimì, I’m sorry._

The young professor simply sat down and had an enormous panic attack in the stairwell, hyperventilating into his own knees with only the smell of mothballs and Lysol to help him through it.

His tears tasted like salt and regret.

_Mimì knelt next to his father in the studio, wrapping his too-long fifteen-year-old arms around him, pulling the older man to his chest and whispering sweet nothings in his ear as he rocked them to and fro. “Count your breaths, I’ve got you.” Sometimes his father got panic attacks, it was another fact of Mimì’s life. Along with the fact that his Da was the best at calming him down by far._

_But Mimì still tried his very fucking best._

_What he got for it was a watery kiss and a look of pure adoration from his father._

_“I love you, my bijou.”_

_“I love you too, just breathe with me, okay?”_

_Two hands, intertwined always_.

  
“ _When somebody loved me, everything was beautiful_  
_Every hour we spent together lives within my heart_

_When **he** loved me…”_

 


	10. Feels like I'm knockin' on heaven's door…

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More plot yay!!!! 30k words for a fucking hug. ;)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An amazing thank you to my unconquerable beta: @makesteverogersproud, she is the only reason that this thing isn't an absolute dumpster fire. 
> 
> Features: Knocking on Heaven's Door by Bob Dylan. 
> 
>  
> 
> WARNING: There is a lot of disordered eating in this chapter, if that triggers you, please steer clear of section 4. <3333 Stay safe, lovies.

  
_“Mama, take this badge from me_  
_I can't use it anymore_  
_It's getting dark, too dark to see_  
_Feels like I'm knockin' on heaven's door…”_

 

  
Mimì rolled his eyes, his mouth twitching in annoyance, as Rufus pressed a Diet Coke and a familiar orange pill canister into his hands.

“Yes, _Mother.”_ The younger man bitched, before he took a burning swig and downed his generous handful of multicolored antibiotics in one go.

It was Rufus’ job to remind Mimì that he was more than just a deep dark pit of assholery and sarcasm.

It was Mimì’s job to remind Rufus to be brave, and that the most important things in the world were worth fighting for.

Whether that advice came from a little boy with eternally messy blond hair, wearing his Da’s much too big boots, or a vertebrate paleontologist with a peeling, sticker-covered, acoustic guitar in his lap, the message still remained the same. _(For a self-professed non-guitarist and non-musician, Mimì had certainly picked up quite a few cords from their Uncle Bri)_. That little blond troublemaker had always been there to pick him up and dust him off, looping their arms together as they marched off towards their next great adventure.

No matter what or how much shit went wrong in Rufus Tiger Taylor’s life, there would always be a hand reaching out to him, one studded in gaudy rings and chipped nail varnish.

_“She didn’t deserve you.”_

_Mimì, seventeen years old and very nearly sloshed, pressed the bottle of Jack against Rufus’ hand until he took it. The older boy sniffled to hide his tears and took a swig of his own, shrugging his shoulders and trying to pretend that he didn’t care. “Yeah.” His voice wavered though and he’d made a funny little noise in the back of his throat as he tried to keep from crying._

_“Stop.” That hand was in his sweaty hair, rubbing soft circles into his scalp. “Not with me. Don’t pretend with me.”_

_That was all it took for him to be sobbing into Mimì’s chest, being cradled by the arms that sometimes felt like the only constants in his life. Lips pressing into his temple and spun sugar whispers of ‘Roo, I know…’ and ‘I’ve got you, it’s okay. Let it out…’_

_Mimì never told him not to cry._

So Rufus didn’t either, at twenty-five years old instead of seventeen, as he pulled Mimì into the tightest hug of his life. His best-friend’s long and still eternally messy hair was falling out of its bun, so Rufus smoothed it back, starting at his cheekbones and ending at his hairline, where the older youth could see the strands of blond growing in at Mimì’s roots. Some things never changed. Like those hands, studded in gaudy rings and chipped nail varnish as they curled into his shirt.

“Oh Blanket, I’m _so sorry.”_ The choked off sobs made everything so much worse, but Rufus wouldn’t dare dissuade them. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Perhaps if he said it enough into the damp and mussed hair of the boy before him, it would make everything better. “…I’m so so sorry.” The sobs only grew more choked up and wheezy.

It was the wheeze that scared Rufus the most.

He still remembered spending part of his childhood in an uncomfortable hospital chair, watching as that smart mouth turned cyanotic and those pneumonic wheezes became all he could hear.

‘ _Are you okay?’_

_He used to ask, the fear plain as day in his eyes._

_Mimì’s hand would always reach out to hold his. Always finding it, even if his eyes were closed in pain. His fingertips blue and cold, the nails painted some odd orangey-red color. Still the same hand. Still the same familiar squeeze._

“Are you okay?”

He asked, what felt like a thousand years later.

But there was no hand with chipped varnish and gaudy rings to clutch onto his now.

There was a pair of them instead, shoving him in the chest with all the strength in that body. Mimì’s beautiful dark eyes looked draconic.

“Of course I’m not, you asshole!” He screamed and then broke off in a fit of coughing that was frightfully labored, with trembling hands perched upon his knees. _“What the hell are you asking me for?!”_ His bottom lip was trembling, fresh tears brightening up his cheeks.

Rufus scooped him back up in his arms and held him close once more, despite the way his best-friend fought and writhed up against him. Mimì’s angry face was the same as it had been as a child, flushed round cheeks and an adorable twisted pout, one that always made Rufus stifle a laugh. “Calm down, Blanket. _Breathe.”_

“Don’t you _dare_ call me that!” A finger poked roughly into his chest. “You had no right to bring them here!” Prominent teeth chomping down on his bottom lip to prevent it from wobbling. “No right!”

“I didn’t.” He shook his towhead with a little sigh.

“You are such a fucking _asshole!”_

“I am.” Running his hands up and down his best-friend’s back to comfort him.

Mimì near-growled as he bitterly shoved himself back from the embrace, hands perched on his hips. Big, ichorous eyes screaming for Rufus to get angry and fight with him, teeth bared and banners blazing, but his best-friend never did.

Rufus could easily see through Mimì’s facade of false bravado. Tiger knew him too well. He knew just how to break Mimì down, by pushing in all his softest places. When Mimì swallowed and squared up again, to say some more pointless angry shit, just being the defensive little porcupine he was. Rufus stilled him with a roll of his eyes and a sigh. “Stop it.” _Stop pretending… you don’t have to do that with me._

Rufus hadn’t realized that he’d said the second part out loud until Mimì was in front of him again, shoving him back, coming apart at the seams.

“Oh really? I don’t have to _pretend?”_ He scoffed. _“Fuck you!”_ He started to laugh in a way that verged on the hysterical. “That’s all they’ve ever wanted from me! Mimì: the good mercurial son, Mimì: the astronomer, Mimì: the singer, Mimì: the pliable doll…” He sighed and it sounded pained as he grew quiet. “I just… didn’t think that was what you wanted too. You were supposed to be **my** person, not _theirs!”_

Rufus ran a hand through his tied-back messy hair, fucking up his bangs once more. “Blanket, all I’ve ever wanted is for you to be happy. Which is why I did this…”

Mimì’s glossy lips twisted into a bitter mockery of his beautiful smile. “Making me confront all my issues with our parental figures without any warning whatsoever?” That switchblade smile grew even sharper, if that was possible. “Really? That’s _rich_ , innit?”

The older blond winced at the tone of the younger’s voice. “Okay, so not my best plan.”

Mimì threw him a scornful look one that shouted his saucy retort without words. Despite the soundless insult, Rufus bristled regardless and shot back, “But would you have stayed if I’d told you?”

“No and that’s the point! _My feelings, my choice!”_ Mimì’s angry voice was fraying around the edges, but he still sounded like a beautiful blond avenging angel, flaming sword in hand.

“They love you.” Rufus said, as if it were one of the core facets of the world spinning on its axis, but it sounded weak even to his own ears.

That flaming sword carved a swath through the air between them.

“You know… yeah, maybe they do. But they don’t _know_ me, or even _like_ me as a person. So what kind of love is that?” Mimì spat, with his viperous split tongue and the hurt plain in his eyes.

  
_“Knock-knock-knockin' on heaven's door_  
_Knock-knock-knockin' on heaven's door…”_

  
From the moment Mimì was born, he was _The Little Prince of Queen._ There was no question about it. That was how he was presented in the press, from the moment his birth was announced.

_The King Of Queen: Freddie Mercury Welcomes A Son!_

_“Mimì Xerxes Hutton was born at Lindo Wing of St Mary's Hospital, London at 9:30pm. Weighing in at 6.5 lbs. The infant is born to Freddie Mercury and his close friend and former-partner Mary Austin._

_Jim Beach, the family’s lawyer and spokesperson tells us that: ‘Mother and baby are doing very well. Freddie is overjoyed and is more than excited to start the newest chapter of his life as a father.’”_

Or so said _The Sun,_ after running an article on Freddie’s impending death just the week before.

No other Queen Child’s birth was met with such a media frenzy, and none of them had the swarms of paparazzi that would trail the youngest Mercury for all his life. He was up there with the likes of Lisa Marie Presley, Bobbi Kristina Brown, and the Jackson children, tethered by the hold of a famous parent whose shadow they would never escape from. Not even Rufus could really relate to Mimì’s fishbowl childhood. Sure, dedicated rock fans knew Roger Taylor from Queen and might be able to name one or two of his kids. But everyone knew Freddie, and everyone knew Mimì by proxy, his baby pictures were printed in tabloids and his life’s every milestone was cataloged by the press.

There was no peace in his life.

Nowadays it was a running joke between them. Rufus sending Mimì click-baited articles with unflattering pictures. Mimì sending him yet another fake obituary announcing his supposed death and a ouija board gif, as they sent tearful laughing emojis back and forth.

But, maybe… maybe… that was why Mimì was _Mimì._

A boy with a voice that could shake a nation, but who never opened up his mouth. Who was terrified to reveal the fact that he felt more than just arousal or rage. That he was human, that he had feelings, that he could bruise and bleed.

That he wasn’t just the world’s lost cause.

Rufus wrapped his hand around his best-friend’s and heaved him up the stairs to the offices above.

A mirror-image of their childhood, where it was Mimì who would pull on his big boots and drag the older boy off onto their next great adventure.

They were both equally surprised that it was Rufus’ turn this time around.

  
_“Knock-knock-knockin' on heaven's door_  
_Knock-knock-knockin' on heaven's door…”_

  
Mimì’s office was so his best-friend that it was unreal.

Sure, it was a sizable boring box with a wide open window just like all the others.

But no matter how hard he tried, Mimì wasn’t one of those stuffy old professors who filled their offices with old books and stale coffee smell. His office wasn’t full of other people’s words and other people’s lives. It was full of his own.

Walls covered in pictures of himself and his dig-team on countless worldwide excursions.

They were all of Mimì at his happiest.

Sporting enough eyeliner to rival the tar-pits he was excavating, cheeks flushed red and sandy dirt streaked through his bubblegum pink hair. No matter where he was or whose arms were thrown around his shoulders, he was smiling, with his head tossed back in frozen laughter. All of the pictures were surrounded by bits of memorabilia, past plane tickets, waxy crayon drawings from Luna, and little fossils in clear cases.

His diplomas were hanging up there as well, stuck up with blue tack, in homemade cases that looked one strong breeze away from shattering.

Kitchy shit ( _T. Rex cookie cutters, dinosaur enamel pins, buttons, plush paleontological creatures and his endless collection of Queen merch)_ was crammed up on shelves and scattered on top of his desk.

He had a bigger office at the university, with even more shit crammed inside, but anyone who knew him could see that loved his museum office more. It was plain to see in the careful touches he left around the room.

Most notably, the family shelf.

A bookcase full of family memorabilia.

A bright pink record player next to a stack of Queen vinyls.

Pictures of their childhood.

Mimì holding up a pair of cream-cheese slathered bagels for eyes, while Rufus did the same thing with oranges. Missing teeth and messy hair, concerts and award ceremonies, school graduations and dances, a mismatched chronology of life in their extraordinary family. There was one of Mimì’s young Baa holding Freddie when he was just a baby, before the imposing teeth came in. Then the same thing echoed by a younger Freddie near the koi pond of Garden Lodge, in a Hawaiian shirt and khakis, holding a chubby blond baby in his arms and beaming at the camera. Seeing Mimì and Freddie in pictures made them seem so happy. The same could be said for Mimì’s snapshots with their uncles. A little blond preschooler sitting atop Brian’s shoulders, five blonds held in Rufus’ Dad’s lap instead of four, Mimì in John’s arms on a pier somewhere. _(Things weren’t so bad when Hurricane Mimì was younger)._

But pictures of him as a teen were full of big smiles that never quite reached his eyes.

His desk was piled with manila folders full of tests and term papers that he had yet to grade and fossils that needed to be catalogued or used in a presentation.

As well as a set of Queen _Funko-Pops_ , still in their boxes, staring down anyone who dared to enter.

Such as a set of their fleshed-out and aged-up counterparts, who were sitting around the room after being shepherded there by Rufus himself, before he went back down to drag Mimì up, kicking and screaming if he had to.

_(Yeah, he had to. The angry gremlin even **bit** him on route)._

He pushed his best-friend inside the violated sanctuary and watched all eyes go to the burning star-bright thing in the center of the room. _(Just as they always had for most of the boys’ lives together. Rufus couldn’t blame them)._

Mimì didn’t greet anyone, because of course he didn’t, that would have been too easy. Instead he calmly walked around the other side of his desk and sat down with legs flung over one of the handles of his desk chair.

Face as flippant and cold as it always was, especially where they were concerned.

Rufus wholeheartedly expected the bloodshed that would come next, expected things to grow ten times worse and he inched over to the door to block it with his body. Just in case.

 _“Mimì Xerxes Hutton!_ What _on earth_ have you done to your lovely arms?!”

Uncle Freddie’s voice split the tension in the room like butter.

Completely shocked, Mimì’s mouth fell open like a loose hinge and he sat up straighter, blinking slowly as Freddie came around the desk and seized his tattooed wrists. Lifting them up and scrutinizing them with a sharp twist to his mouth, lips pursed.

“I… I got tattoos.”

Eloquent, as Mimì’s tongue fumbled about in his mouth like a dead fish.

“We can see that one, MM.”

Rufus’ own father quipped, making Mimì’s round face scrunch up until it resembled that of a rabid Pomeranian.

“Can you also see the door?”

The older blond regretted not bringing a spray bottle to train the masses, he’d given them too much credit. “Hush, both of you! Mimì, quit being facetious.” _(“Oh, but that’s my whole personality gone!”)._ “Dad, please stop provoking him.”

Rufus walked over to the wall of degrees and unceremoniously plucked one off the plaster. The color drained out of Mimì’s cheeks.

“Roo…. _don’t,_ it’s not worth it.”

The younger hellion genuinely sounded beaten for once, like it hurt too much to bother, and that only stirred up Rufus’ desire to shove the ratty frame into his Uncle Freddie’s hands. Acting all of five years old again. _See… See! Look what Mimì did!_

“No, no, we have to start somewhere. And this pisses me off more than words can say, so let’s start here.” Blue eyes met soft brown. “How the fuck do you miss your son getting his PhD?” The words came out more angry than he’d expected but Rufus couldn’t bring himself to regret them.

“His… _what?”_ Freddie stared at the diploma blankly, like he couldn’t believe it existed at all.

“His PhD? In Vertebrate Paleontology from Imperial College, the youngest in his class… by far.” Rufus’ arms were crossed tightly. While Mimì visibly contemplated bashing his brains out on his desk. “He’s got a few other degrees too and he’s a professor now… When was the last time you came to one of his graduations, hm? His exhibitions? An award ceremony even?” Really laying it on thick.

“Rufus!” Mimì’s voice was sharp enough to cut glass and the older blond jumped at the sound. “It’s not a big deal. Let it go.”

He remembered how delighted he was when he watched Uncle Bri get his PhD, the pure joy as he bounced up and down, clapping for his hero. How proud he’d been.

How proud he was on his own special day.

It was a big deal then.

Now, he was just sick of talking about it.

The frame was set aside with a small thump and they both just looked at each other for a moment. Really looked at each other, for the first time in years. As if everything else around them was white noise. They took in every grey hair, every wrinkle, every line, and every scar.

Freddie took in his son.

And Mimì took in his father.

  
_“Mama, put my guns in the ground_  
_I can't shoot them anymore_  
_That cold black cloud is comin' down_  
_Feels like I'm knockin' on heaven's door…”_

  
Gymnastics, like loving his father, was an endless series of both flying and falling.

And Mimì loved every instant of it.

As once you learn to fly and fall with every breath in your lungs, it’s nearly impossible to stop. It didn’t matter whether he was taking flight on the floor, or smashing into the pommel horse so hard he broke a rib or two. It was nonstop, especially once he started competing in the university-college circuit.

Mimì Xerxes Hutton was born a performer, he was Freddie’s son after all, and his only real goal was to engage the audience.

He would do anything to make them laugh or gasp, either at his balls of steel or his cheeky smiles.

He would even perform technically illegal moves, like the _Korbut flip_ and the _Thomas Salto._

The Korbut he finagled into competition, mainly because he performed it on the horizontal bar instead of the uneven bars and he was a man, not a woman. While the Thomas Salto had crunched too many gymnasts’ neck vertebrae to make it legal in Women’s gymnastics, in Men’s it was still possible to flip around in the grey area for a little while. The moves were pure point guzzlers, but at least they kept the audience entertained.

The spectators were always so enraptured by the way he moved.

The way he tossed suggestive winks at the audience and threw dance moves into his floor routine.

Every laugh or clap was fuel to the massive raging inferno that was Mimì Hutton the gymnast.

But there were always several noticeable gaps in the crowd.

Freddie never came to Mimì’s meets, even after he learned about his son’s passion. The first time he tried, it ended with the old rocker having a panic attack in the crowded stadium bathroom, after watching his little boy stand on top of a ten-foot bar in a tuck and fling himself backwards headfirst without holding onto anything. Freddie’s heart had practically stopped inside of his chest and he couldn’t stop crying for a good thirty minutes afterwards. Even when his son caught himself with practiced ease.

Flying and falling tended to become indistinguishable, once you did them for most of your life.

Mimì didn’t notice he was falling until there was blood dripping out of his mouth and staining the toilet seat beneath his hands.

Until his best-friend was looking at him like he was at death’s door.

Until he looked in the mirror and saw someone he didn’t recognize, staring back at him.

The swollen cheeks, jaundiced eyes, the deep bags beneath them, his cracked lips and deadened gaze.

He suddenly understood why Rufus was so afraid. He looked like a corpse. Like he was already dead and gone.

Mimì stopped flying and falling, when Rufus’ trembling arms wrapped around him that night and he finally finally understood.

He didn’t want to die.

He didn’t want to join the ranks.

The little girls in sparkly leotards who survived on an apple a day… until they couldn’t anymore. The little boys with medals noosed around their necks, who stuck their fingers down their throats or shot up with drugs… until they couldn’t anymore. They were innumerable. The casualties were so immense.

 _Gymnastics,_ a coach had said once. _Meant flips, bars, leaps and eating disorders._

Weigh-ins before and after practices, coaches and teammates all having something to say about the size of your thighs, the concavity of your stomach, or the ribs they could or couldn’t see.

Freddie Mercury was terrified for his son, but for all the wrong reasons.

He couldn’t see the monsters that followed Mimì home every night.

None of them could.

  
_“Knock-knock-knockin' on heaven's door_  
_Knock-knock-knockin' on heaven's door…”_

  
“I’m so proud of you.”

Mimì stared as though his father had just spoken to him in Ancient Greek. “What?” It even came out with a little laugh and his lips curling up in incredulity.

“I’m so fucking proud of you, darling.” _My baby. My boy. My little lion cub._

Strong arms wrapped around Mimì’s shoulders to hold him at a distance for observation. Arms that were still muscled after years and years spent apart, dappled with salt and pepper with tan skin below. Mimì still remembered how he’d once been small enough to stand up on his father’s feet, holding onto those arms for support. Back when there were no liver spots or wrinkles, no white in the hair beneath his little hands.

His father’s arms were trembling with stifled sobs.

That was when he realized Freddie was crying.

“Shit, Fred…” Uncle Roger stepped forwards, but was held back by Brian’s hand on his shoulder and a pointed shake of his head. Uncle Deaky was crying too, quietly though, as he held onto Brian’s other side. Stupid soft old men.

Tears dripped down his father’s craggy cheeks. Mr. Mercury was still so unfairly handsome in his 70s. More salt than pepper in his hair, but still clinging onto that black regardless. There were lines around his eyes, his mouth, but that smile was the same. That smile they shared was still there, the same with those eyes. His father looked back at him with something akin to wonder, like he thought Mimì was liable to disappear at any moment. The old man held on as tight as he dared to his wayward little boy.

That same wayward little boy, who had grown into a wayward young man, closed the gap between them with a croaking breath of his own.

The hug was so tight it was painful, for both of them.

Mimì was afraid to cling too tightly, lest he hurt the old man his father had become without him realizing it. But Freddie had no such qualms, and there was certainly life left in those old bones yet. It was the farthest thing from a cold hug, _(they’d shared plenty of those over the years, as chilly as forgotten tea and just about as warming)._ This by contrast, was a burning swaddle, Mimì felt as though he were pinned in a cocoon, a little butterfly-to-be. His nose was pressed into his father’s neck, and he inhaled the familiar, comforting scent that he had never been able to name.

“I’m so sorry I missed it.”

Mimì didn’t know what his father was referring to, but it sounded like more than just a few graduations.

“It’s okay, Baba.”

It came out in a stilted little breath into his father’s seashell ear and the name only seemed to make Freddie cry harder, his sobs shaking his shoulders.

The sound of their intensity bade the young man to take a step back, all so he could see his father’s damp and blotchy face once again. _(Stricken by the tears that glimmered there, unbidden and unwelcome)._

Freddie tried to wave him off, mumbling something about looking a bloody fright, but Mimì merely used the thumbs of each hand to brush the tears away.

A soothing gesture that his father had done to him many a time during his childhood. _All better now._

 _“I’m so sorry.”_ Mimì whispered and swallowed around the glass bits in his throat. “To all of you… I shouldn’t have done what I did downstairs.” He started to babble at warp speed, like he always did when he was upset, his hands tightening around his own arms in punishment. “Uncle Bri, I didn’t mean it. You know that, I… I’ve got too many of my own demons to think _that_ about yours. It was an honor to be able to help you, even the slightest bit, during those dark times and… and Uncle Deaky, I _know_ how you feel about crowds and… _I shouldn’t have…”_

Freddie finally leaned in and kissed him between the eyebrows, putting a finger to his lips to get him to shut up.

“It’s alright, love. It’s alright.”

Mimì nodded with a familiar toothy smile, as if he’d been given absolution, and sagged into the embrace once again.

It was only his father’s strong arms that kept him from falling.

  
_“Knock-knock-knockin' on heaven's door…”_

 

 


End file.
